Q: I got an error message when trying to edit text with the Content Editing tool.  What does it mean?

A: There are two potential warning messages for this situation:

1. The font and text can not be edited because the proper character code mapping is unavailable.
This happens when the character encoding for an embedded font is not available.  Characters can not be mapped to Unicode. PDF Studio relies on being able to map the characters to Unicode in order to allow the text to be edited. You may notice that characters will display as undefined white square characters in the dialog editor pane.

There is no way to fix this issue and this text can not be edited in PDF Studio. The workaround we can suggest is to delete the text and type in new text using PDF Studio’s typewriter annotation tool. Then flatten the annotation so the text is added to the content of the PDF document. Unfortunately, the new text font may match perfectly with the rest of the document.

2. Some of the current characters are not supported for this font, you may loose character information.
This happens when the text you are trying to edit is using a font that is only partially embedded within the PDF document.

To minimize the size of PDFs on creation, it is common that only characters used within the document are included in the font definition.

If you type any characters that are not used in the PDF document and not defined in the font embedded within the PDF document, you will get this warning messag because PDF Studio does not have enough information about the characters to draw them properly.

Sometimes characters are defined in the font but the character widths are set to zero.  PDF Studio will draw the glyphs on top of each others.

To work around this issue, you can try switching to another font.

  • Switch to one of the standard PDF fonts:  Courier, Helvetica®, Times New Roman. These fonts show at the top of the fonts drop-down combo box under the Standard Fonts header.
  • Switch to another document font: These fonts show at the bottom of the fonts drop-down combo box under the Document Fonts header.  This will only work if the other document font does contain all the characters you’re trying to use. Otherwise, you will get the same warning message as for the previous font.

If you notice any issues with PDF Studio’s Text Edit tool that are not addressed by the explanations above, please send us your PDF documents at studiosupport@qoppa.com.

Note: Helvetica® is a trademark of Monotype Imaging Inc.