AD poorly imports vertical text (and screws up some horizontal text too) when importing from pdf

[MickM]

I'm converting all of my old Canvas documents to AD and the only safe Canvas export format that maintains layers when I import into AD is pdf. One big issue for me is that all vertically oriented text is imported as individual characters instead of a text box containing all of the relevant vertical text. I'm unclear if this is a Canvas export-to-pdf issue or if this is an AD import issue. Can you please look into this? I have attached a pdf exported from Canvas.

The only horizontal text that doesn't import nicely as a text frame but instead imports as individual characters (i.e. same issue as the vertical text) is the text in the middle that says "Floor Area 6' x 3'". Note that when importing the pdf I checked the boxes for both "Favor editable text over fidelity" and "Group lines of text into text frames". I tried various other versions of those check boxes but it didn't make any difference to the issue being reported.

Tori's Condo.pdf

[Hangman]

Hi Mick,

Have you tried disabling Exact character positioning when exporting your Canvas file to pdf?

I very much suspect this is a Canvas issue but one way to confirm would be to try (if you haven't already) unchecking Exact character positioning, exporting a file to pdf and then importing it back into Canvas to see whether or not the vertical text is still editable...

[NathanC]

For what it's worth, opening your PDF in Acrobat has not interpreted the vertical text (and some horizontal) as editable text fields, the same as Designer.

Acrobat Editable Text fields:

Designer All Text Frames:

[MickM]

Responding to both answers here. I wasn't able to disable "exact character positioning" when exporting the Canvas file to pdf because I couldn't find anywhere to set that option. However, that tip led me to explore the influence of other options that I could set. I had previously done my exports using "Save As..." which yields a dialog box containing a drop-down menu of file formats from which I selected "Adobe Acrobat (Advanced)". When I click on "Save" within that dialog box it doesn't actually do a save but brings up yet another form (i.e. the button should have been "Save..." instead of "Save") containing options for the selected PDF format. On that form there is a drop-down menu for "PDF Compatibility" - the default format being "Acrobat 6.0 and later (PDF 1.5)". So I experimented by chosing the latest PDF version offered i.e. "Acrobat 9.0 and later (PDF 1.7)" and then clicked OK and made my PDF. After importing that PDF into AD all the text (both horizontal and vertical) was selectable and editable in the expected way! Woo hoo! So as an experiment, I tried exporting to PDF again to zero in on which PDF version caused things to break - however they all ended up working just fine after opening them in AD - including the original PDF 1.5 version! I quit both Canvas and AD, and even restarted my machine but every time I exported to any PDF version the result always yielded fully editable horizontal and vertical text after importing into AD.

So now I don't know what's going on - it appears whatever was making Canvas output a PDF that had that anomalous text export behavior is now gone :-/. Anyway, this clearly isn't a an AD problem - it's a Canvas problem. Thanks to those who responded - my problem is now fixed, although I don't know how or why! 

[Hangman]

Hi Mick,

Thanks for the update and I’m really glad you’ve been able to resolve the issue even if it’s still a slight mystery as to how 😊