Q: When trying to edit text in a document I get the following message “Some characters are not supported by this font and may be lost.” Why am I getting this message and why aren’t my typed characters being displayed?
A: The reason you are receiving this message is because some of the characters you are attempting to type are not available in the chosen font. This means that when the document was created only a partial amount of the font was stored within the document. In most cases only the font characters used within the document will be stored within the PDF. This is usually done during PDF creation or optimization to help reduce the size of a PDF.
For example: It’s possible that only the letters A, B, C, D are stored in the PDF and if you attempt to type a “T” it will not be available. The available characters can even be case sensitive and the lowercase letter “a” may be available but the upper case “A” could not be available.
If you still need to edit the text in the document you can use one of the workarounds below.
Workarounds
Look at the Text Object – Properties dialog and if you see “Embedded Subset” next to the font name it will be missing characters that could show the warning message. You will need to select a new font from the drop down list using either a standard or other embedded font.
Standard PDF fonts: Courier, Helvetica®, Times New Roman are complete fonts available within PDF Studio. These fonts show at the top of the fonts drop-down combo box under the Standard Fonts header.
Other Embedded fonts: These fonts show at the bottom of the fonts drop-down combo box under the Document Fonts header. In order for this to work you will need to find another font that is NOT a subset or a subset that contains all of the characters you wish to use. If the font does not contain the character the same warning message will be displayed.
Note: Helvetica® is a trademark of Monotype Imaging Inc.
