BugsJane Posted October 28, 2019 Share Posted October 28, 2019 A combination of symbols showed up when I imported a PDF page in which I would like to make additions and corrections. What causes this and how do I correct it? Page 3 scrambled.pdf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
walt.farrell Posted October 28, 2019 Share Posted October 28, 2019 When you say that you imported a PDF page, do you mean File > Open or File > Place? If you mean that you used Place, try Opening it, which may give more options for and notifications about missing fonts. -- Walt Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases PC: Desktop: Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Laptop: Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU. iPad: iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard Mac: 2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BugsJane Posted October 28, 2019 Author Share Posted October 28, 2019 Hi, Walt, Thanks for your reply. When I ... File and Open ... or File and Place ... or drag the PDF to the AfPub icon ... all give me the same gobbledygook! Here is the info on the file. Others with the same info will open just fine in AfPub. I had to delete this as the original was changed today. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenmcd Posted October 28, 2019 Share Posted October 28, 2019 It looks like the original PDF was created with a pre-Unicode font. The Times-Roman font encoding is listed as MacRomanEncoding. This is an older Mac encoding before Unicode fonts became the standard. It appears that APub has no idea how to import this old encoding and convert it to Unicode. If you have access to editing the original document you can change the font to a modern Unicode font, and try again. If you want to recreate the PDF document ... You may have to resort to: copy PDF text, paste to text editor, then paste into APub That is assuming your Mac text editor will convert the text to Unicode. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BugsJane Posted October 28, 2019 Author Share Posted October 28, 2019 Thanks for your reply. I originally made this document with a desktop publishing program for Mac called Ready,Set,Go. It no longer has an updated Mac version. I lost this program when my old computer died. Text Editor listed the symbols as a Times Font. I tried several things but couldn't get anything to change. I tried copying and pasting into Pages. I just got symbols again. I highlighted and selected Times font and nothing changed. Here is some of it. ?()#+()D+R(0"+O)(>>+-#%+A)+(+;(L&'D#+/>A)/A&#D+2L+%;#+Q0%;#&() K%0D#)%+ B#)%#&+ ')+ B#D(&+ ,(""/*+ .A=(*+ =;'"#+ /%0DL')1+ (%+ %;#+ K%(%# BA""#1#+A@+.A=(*+)A=+)(-#D+%;#+e)'G#&/'%L+A@+FA&%;#&)+.A=(3+R(0" ;(D+ %&()/@#&&#D+ @&A-+ Q0%;#&+ BA""#1#+ (@%#&+ %=A+ L#(&/+ ()D+ $;()1#D -(_A&/3+:L+1A')1+%A+$"(//#/+L#(&T&A0)D+?()#+1&(D0(%#D+')+%;&##+L#(&/ ')+78VV+='%;+(+D#1&##+')+#"#-#)%(&L+#D0$(%'A)3++R(0"+1&(D0(%#D+='%; (+ ;'1;+ /$;AA"+ 2'A"A1L+ #D0$(%'A)+ D#1&##+ ')+ 78V93+ + ?()#+ %(01;%+ @'&/% 1&(D#+')+B#D(&+,(""/+@A&+A)#+L#(&+=;'"#+R(0"+@')'/;#D+$A""#1#3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenmcd Posted October 28, 2019 Share Posted October 28, 2019 Some thoughts ... The original PDF may or may not have text which can be highlighted and copied. It depends on how the PDF creator software has made the PDF. I have no idea -- even if you have a Mac which understands that encoding -- if the text can be copied. Sometimes the glyph is placed in the PDF and the codes behind them make no sense at all. Actually, I would like to see the original PDF to see what is there. I am looking at the PDF from above which has the garbled characters, and the codes behind those characters are correct. Which I interpret as GIGO. When it was pasted that is the code it got. If the code is not copy-able, then OCR may be an option. Found a demo version of Ready,Set,Go for Mac still on CNET (if you had access to a Mac with 10.7). The Windows version of Ready,Set,Go will open those files, but it is $150, which may make sense if you have to do a lot of these. If you cannot copy the text then a PDF editor with OCR may be your best option. Maybe Walt has some more (better) ideas (I use Windows 10). A_B_C 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
walt.farrell Posted October 28, 2019 Share Posted October 28, 2019 Sorry, no other ideas. Well, maybe one. Perhaps you can copy from the PDF and paste into a Mac text editing program that understands that encoding. Then convert to Unicode using that text editor. A_B_C 1 -- Walt Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases PC: Desktop: Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Laptop: Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU. iPad: iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard Mac: 2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BugsJane Posted October 29, 2019 Author Share Posted October 29, 2019 I am unfamiliar with encoding and Unicode. I guess I will have to retype anything that won't load up. This was one page out of many in genealogy files. Thanks for your efforts walt.farrell and LibreTraining. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A_B_C Posted October 29, 2019 Share Posted October 29, 2019 I guess you won’t like to share the original PDF publicly, as it contains a lot of personal information. I still have access to a Mac running OS X Lion 10.7 and to a Mac running OS 9. So if you want, you could send me one of those PDFs to have a look, using the personal messenger of the forum. It would be sad if you’d lose all this precious information. Alex Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BugsJane Posted October 29, 2019 Author Share Posted October 29, 2019 I also have the program PDF Expert which is an editing program. I can load the document into the program, but it immediately switches to symbols when I insert the cursor into a section. Fortunately, so far I have found only this one PDF of 8 pages that has this problem out of about 770 genealogy pages. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. A_B_C 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BugsJane Posted October 29, 2019 Author Share Posted October 29, 2019 The GOOD (on top) and the BAD (below)! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BugsJane Posted October 29, 2019 Author Share Posted October 29, 2019 LibreTraining, I do have a Mac OS10.3. Guess that won't work! I also have a Windows version which I could try on my friend's computer if I discover more documents. What OCR would you recommend? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenmcd Posted October 29, 2019 Share Posted October 29, 2019 @BugsJane I downloaded the Mac demo version (7.7) here:https://download.cnet.com/Ready-Set-Go/3000-6675_4-3774.html The Diwan Ready,Set,Go! page here:https://www.diwan.com/index.php/products/desktop-publishing/39-ready-set-go-for-macintosh says: Ready,Set,Go! 7.7 for Mac OS X (versions 10.3 to 10.6) (so my note above about 10.7 is wrong) So it should work on Mac OS 10.3. I am guessing that if you can get the files open, and change the font to a newer Unicode font, you may be able to copy-and-paste the text into APub, or into a Mac editor. Regarding OCR -- no idea on a Mac. Perhaps Walt and A_B_C have some ideas. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A_B_C Posted October 29, 2019 Share Posted October 29, 2019 @LibreTraining, Jane sent me one of her original PDFs, and I was able to successfully run it through OCR software. That was the easiest way to recover the text, and a great idea, by the way. I simply exported the PDF document to a high-res image file and used my older version of Abbyy Fine Reader to parse the text: https://www.abbyy.com/en-eu/finereader/pro-for-mac/ It worked perfectly. The root of the issue is most certainly an encoding problem, but unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to investigate the problem any further tonight. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BugsJane Posted October 29, 2019 Author Share Posted October 29, 2019 A_B_C, thank you for checking this out for me. I appreciate your offer and the time you expended to find an answer. I will certainly keep OCR in mind for future use. Thank you for your willingness to help one who is a novice at much of this. A_B_C 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts