I have a personal pdf document with no security features enabled and is packed with embedded fonts.
If I try to extract multiple pages from this document, Adobe Acrobat (version 6.0 Pro) completely crashes with the following errors:
--The instruction at "0x007e530e" referenced memory at "0x00000000". The memory could not be "read".--
--The instruction at "0x2d8818d3" referenced memory at "0x00000008". The memory could not be "read".--
(One or more of these errors can occur as I've heard from others who had the same problem...)
Another strange fact I've found is that if I extract a single page at a time, Acrobat doesn't crash. Instead, I receive the following error upon viewing the page or if the page is inserted into another document:
--Cannot extract the embedded font '[font's name]'. Some characters may not display or print correctly.--
I am really concerned with Acrobat's unstable way of handling extraction of embedded fonts aka "crashing" since I have many pdf documents with fonts embedded in them, and I don't want to this problem to continue.
Manually extracting each page one at a time is not an option since they throw out errors even after the extraction
was successful.
From what I've read in: http://www.experts-exchang
I understand that I might need to get Acrobat 5 or use a method to extract embedded fonts since Acrobat 6
seems to have removed this feature. However, extracting the fonts is not my goal. I want to find a way to replace these "crash causing" embedded fonts for good. (Or even find a way to prevent Acrobat from crashing upon extraction of these documents)
My question is this: How can I go about finding some way to detect all "non-extractable" embedded fonts in a pdf document and replace them with an alternative font?
If this is not possible, I would like to know how I can correctly extract the pages in the pdf document with embedded fonts without having Acrobat crash unexpectedly.
Any ideas?
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hi khkremer, I have tried PitStop and found numerous errors. I also found an interesting tool within this software to replace embedded fonts. However, I haven't been able to use this feature correctly yet since the pdf is still crashing.
I have included a sample pdf file that demonstrates this "Embedded Font Crash" on a temporary server. It will remain there until this problem is solved...
http://my.sanbrunocable.co
Thanks for your help, Guru. ^_~
The file is corrupt. There is something really weird going on with the fonts in this file. I've removed the subset embedded Times-New-Roman font, which leaves only non-embedded references to Times-New-Roman (some of which were in the file from the beginning). When I access any of the pages that use this font, I get the same error message.
The file was created with the Jaws PDF Creator, which usually does a pretty good job.
Did you create the PDF file? If so, is it possible that your PDF creator configuration is corrupt? Is it possible that you have a corrupt version of Times-New-Roman on your system?
I was able to fix (?) the problem (at least I can extract all the pages in one operation) by using PitStop's Global Change (Edit>Show PitStop Global Change) to replace all occurrences of Times-New-Roman with TimesNewRomanPSMT.
My Acrobat never crashed, but I'm doing this on a Mac, but I hope that the fact that the error message is no longer displayed, the problem is really gone.
no, kremer, I did not make the pdf file myself. It was given to me. The
possibility of this file being corrupt is very high, but I felt this problem
might be common to some users who have pdf's with embedded fonts.
I'm glad to hear PitStop was actually able to solve the crashing problem.
However, upon speaking with Bryan Guignard (I wish he were here so that he
could recieve some points...), a PDF Certified Expert, I finally found
another solution to take rather than using PitStop.
This is what he said:
[Usually this type of error message indicates that you are trying to perform
an editing process on a PDF that only has a font subset. Font subsets cannot
be used for editing purposes, whereas an embedded font can. In this case the
solution is to return to the source file and recreate the PDF from it, with
all the fonts embedded...or...install these fonts on your system.
The other possibility (and this is caused by the original app that created
the source document) is an unusual font encoding that Acrobat can't fully
understand. This one can be hard to fix. All you can do is try differrent
settings when you create the PDF, or convert your source file to another
format and use that second format to create your PDF.
Another potential solution would be to convert your file (with Acrobat) to
PS or EPS and then re-distill it to create a new PDF. Depending on what's
wrong with the original PDF, this may or may not work.]
For me, using Adobe Acobat to convert from PDF to PS and re-distilling back
to PDF was a great way to remove/replace all the "bad/unknown" fonts from
the pdf file. It also solved the crashing problem.
Not quite: This problem is definitely not caused by the fact that the font(s) were subset. As long as you are only extracting pages, the subset of characters will not change, so you should be able to pull one or more pages out of the document. Acrobat will of course only put the subset font into your new (or updated) PDF file, but it will not crash or report the error both of us have seen.
As long as you are not editing the text with the touchup text tool the font encoding should not matter either: Acrobat does not have to understand the encoding in order to extract one or more pages. It will just copy what it finds in regards to fonts and page content, so you would again not see the crash or the error message.
The workaround you got with redistilling the file probably does something similar than what I do with PitSTop: It cleans up the font mess.
I still suspect that the problem is caused by two fonts using the same name, one being embedded, the other one not. I suspect that the PDF file is referencing the wrong copy of the font (e.g. the embedded copy when it should reference the non-embedded copy).
With a lot of time, I could analyze the file on the actual page content stream level, but because you don't have control over how the file was created, this information would not help you.
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by: khkremerPosted on 2004-06-07 at 02:35:53ID: 11247366
I can assure you that this is not normal Acrobat behavior. There is no such thing as a "non-extractable" font.
There is either something wrong with one of the fonts that's used in this document, or something wrong with the rest of the PDF file.
If you know that you have all the fonts that are used in this PDF file available on your local system, you can use e.g. Enfocus PitStop Professional (http://www.enfocus.com) to remove all embedded fonts, and then in a second step embed the fonts again. You can get a 30 day eval version of PitStop to do this. You can also use PitStop to "preflight" the document, which may tell you what's wrong with it. Can you make one of these files available on a web site, so that I can take a look?