Manatee

A PDF that shows boxes or missing text on a Mac

· 7 min read

A PDF that shows empty boxes, the wrong symbols or gaps where words should be almost always has a font problem: the file asks for a font it does not carry, or the copy of the font it does carry is incomplete or damaged. Less often it is a scan whose hidden text layer does not line up, or a corrupted file. A one-minute copy and paste test tells you which, and that decides whether the fix is a new copy from the sender, a font installed on your Mac, or a repair.

What each symptom usually means

PDFs are meant to carry their fonts inside them. Most do, but usually only as a subset: just the characters the document used at the moment it was exported, which keeps the file compact. When that arrangement breaks, the symptom points roughly at where.

  • Empty rectangles in place of some characters. The viewer knows which character belongs there but has no shape for it in the font it is using. Typical with non-Latin scripts, math symbols, arrows and emoji in a file whose font was not embedded, so your Mac substituted one that lacks those characters.
  • Ordinary letters where symbols should be. A tick mark that shows as a ΓΌ, bullets that turn into a lowercase l or a q. The original used a symbol font that was not embedded, and the viewer drew the same character codes in a regular font.
  • Boxes or gaps only inside filled-in form fields. The form embedded a subset of its font when it was built, and the answers typed later include characters that subset never had: an accented name, a currency sign, another alphabet.
  • Every word on a page missing while lines and pictures are fine. The font failed to load at all. That case overlaps with the guide to blank pages, which covers it in more depth.
  • Random wrong characters across whole paragraphs, alongside other trouble. Points toward a damaged font inside a damaged file.

Spacing is a clue as well. Text that appears but sits too wide, too tight or overlapping usually means a substitute font of a different width is standing in for one that was never embedded.

Run the copy test

This separates “the words are in the file but drawn wrongly” from “the words themselves are wrong or absent.”

  1. Open the PDF in Preview and choose Tools > Text Selection.
  2. Click on an affected page, press Command-A to select the text, then Command-C to copy it.
  3. Open TextEdit, make a new document, and choose Edit > Paste and Match Style (Option-Shift-Command-V), so the text appears in TextEdit’s own font rather than the PDF’s.

Then compare what pasted with what you expected.

  • It pastes correctly. The words are intact in the file and only the drawing is wrong. That is a font problem, not lost content.
  • It pastes as gibberish but looks fine on screen. The opposite fault: the font draws correctly but lacks the map from shapes back to letters, so copy and search fail. Some apps export this way. It is not damage.
  • It pastes as the same wrong characters you see. The text is encoded in a way your Mac cannot decode without the original font, or the file is damaged.
  • Nothing pastes. There is no text layer. The page is an image (a scan, or a photo of a page) or the text was turned into outlines, so the boxes are part of the picture and no font fix applies.

Next, press Command-F and search for a word you can clearly see. On a scanned page with recognized text laid over it, a highlight that lands beside or below the word, or a selection that covers the wrong lines, means the hidden text layer does not match the picture. Copy and search will be unreliable on those pages even though they look perfect.

Find out where the file came from

In Preview, choose Tools > Show Inspector (Command-I). The General Info pane lists the Content creator and the PDF Producer. A scanner or document-capture app there tells you the page is an image with recognized text on top. A word processor or design app tells you the text is real text and the font is the suspect.

Preview does not list a PDF’s fonts or say whether they are embedded, and Finder’s Get Info does not either. Full-featured PDF readers usually do: their document properties have a Fonts list that marks each font as embedded, embedded subset, or not embedded. Embedded subsets carry a six-letter prefix and a plus sign in their names, such as ABCDEF+Helvetica. If you have such a reader, that list settles the question in seconds.

Fixes for a font problem

Work through these in order. Only the first is fully reliable.

  1. Ask for a new export with fonts embedded. Whoever made the file can export it again. Most export dialogs embed fonts by default; where there is a choice, a PDF/A option forces every font into the file, because the standard requires it. For a filled-in form, ask them to print it to PDF, which turns the answers into part of the page.
  2. Install the missing font. If the copy test pasted correctly and the font was not embedded, macOS will usually use an installed font with the same name. Double-click the font file, click Install in Font Book, then quit and reopen the PDF. This helps only for fonts that were never embedded, and only with a licensed copy of the right font.
  3. Try a viewer with a different engine. Preview and Quick Look draw PDFs with the same macOS code, so they substitute fonts the same way. Browsers from other companies ship their own PDF engines, which choose different fallbacks and sometimes draw characters Preview cannot. If one shows the page correctly, print or export a new PDF from it and keep the original.
  4. Take the words out. If the text pasted correctly, you have the content whatever the screen shows. For a contract you need to sign and return that is not enough, but for reading it often is.

When the file is damaged, and what Repair can do

Suspect damage rather than a missing font when the garbled text comes with other trouble: pages that refuse to render, a file far smaller than it should be, errors in some apps, or a download or copy that was interrupted. The checks in Preview can’t open this PDF, such as the file command and the %%EOF marker at the end, apply here too.

Manatee repairs PDFs on your Mac. Drop the file on its menu bar icon or into its window, or right-click it in Finder and choose Services > Fix with Manatee. It rebuilds the structure that tells a reader where each page, image and font lives, writes a new copy next to the original (which it never modifies), and reports the outcome as Fixed, Partial or Not fixable. Nothing is uploaded, and the first 24 hours are free with every feature.

What that can and cannot change:

  • If the font data is still in the file and only the structure pointing to it was broken, the repaired copy can draw the text again.
  • If a font was never embedded, nothing is broken, so there is nothing for a repair to rebuild. The boxes will still be there, and the fixes in the previous section are the ones that work.
  • If the font’s own data was damaged or cut off, a repair cannot recreate the missing shapes. No tool can invent a font that is not in the file.
  • A misaligned text layer on a scan is not damage either. It needs the text recognition run again in an app that does OCR, which is a different job from a repair.

Questions

Why does the PDF look fine on the sender’s computer? Their computer has the font installed, so a file that never embedded it still draws correctly there. That is exactly why the problem goes unnoticed until the file reaches someone else. Ask them to export again with fonts embedded.

Will printing the PDF get rid of the boxes? Only if you print from a viewer that draws the page correctly. Printing from Preview prints what Preview draws, boxes included.

Can I replace the font inside the PDF myself? Not in Preview, which does not edit existing text. Changing the font in the original document and exporting again is quicker and more reliable than any workaround on the finished PDF.