I have problems when using adobe acrobrat pro combining certain pdfs that have been exported using prince.

It seems it may be a setting i need to change or something within the uni-code to fix my SR copies that are being outputted because i cant combine them without errors. (The rest of the files can be combined with no issues.)

Here are the files to give you a better idea.

2013 (this is just a cover sheet to combine with)

SR01(This is one of the files that causes the issue) *but alone as a pdf it is fine.

binder1(files from above combined to show you what happens) *On my adobe the missing letters everywhere are actually empty boxes.

Edited 6 Jul 2012 by jordant

Can you try generating the PDF with Prince 8.1? We've made some adjustments to font handling recently which might change the result.

The square or empty spots have changed where they are located but still cause an issue.

I am not sure which version the client is using when they got there erros it is either version 5 or 7. I then tested it using 8.1 from my local machine.

Here is what mine looks like.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/y44fea4itwl1u0a/Binder2.pdf

(I used there cover sheets with my SR01 copy.) The cover sheets dont cause the problem but when any SR is added it creates missing letters.

Looks like a bug in Acrobat. Can you try regenerating the PDF file from Prince and disable font subsetting with --no-subset-fonts on the command-line? If that doesn't help, you could also try --no-embed-fonts to disable font embedding entirely. It seems that Acrobat has trouble merging two PDF files that refer to the same fonts in different ways.

Still the same issues. Tried all the different commands on the command line for output. It makes them either get the square boxes(missing texts) or overlaps text onto each other.

I tried using both 7.0 and 8.1

version 7 is on a linux machine thats in production.
version 8.1 was on my local windows machine.

Tricky. At this point it might be best to raise the issue with Adobe, as it seems to be a problem with Acrobat. The only other workarounds I can think of is using different fonts in the two documents, and seeing if that avoids the problem, or using a different program to combine the two PDF files.

Free software PDFill was able to have no problems. I did test Adobe Acrobat 8, 9 , 10. These all had the same issue.

Also found this, seems on point if you read the "Glyph glitches to avoid"
http://americanprinter.com/alt/mag/printing_best_pdfs/

I will get back to you on the results of changing the font output.

Thanks again.

Michael,

Note comments in the following article:
http://americanprinter.com/alt/mag/printing_best_pdfs/ under the section call "Glyph glitches to avoid".

The matter of merging is designed to create one consistent output document. The samples provided are just a sample. In our real scenario, the idea is for the merged document to look like "one" document, not a collection. Therefore, varying the font between documents isn't the best option.

Using another merge tool is something that might work, it is unproven for our final documents that are 100s of pages long. Having to use another tool does seem like a kludge, at least that's my gut reaction. I'll have to convince a customer that this is valid approach and I know they are not going to look favorably upon it although they might accept it given no alternative.

This has been a long standing and nagging issue that spans many different versions of Adobe Pro and Prince. I'm not optimistic that Adobe will provide a solution.

Do you have any further thoughts?

Thanks!

I can recreate the problem here, but when I disable font subsetting or font embedding it works fine. Can you email me (mikeday@yeslogic.com) the input HTML document to test with?

Sent you a couple html and pdf files, just checking if you received them.