Solved! Adobe Acrobat Pro DC: why does added / edited text look FAINT, THIN? 🤔😵

[SoftwareEng]

Any Adobe Acrobat Pro DC users out there? I'm editing an existing eBook, but any text I type (or cut & paste within this doc) looks thinner and more faint than the original text - even though the font is the same Times New Roman.

Are there extra font settings, like weight & thickness? Even if I simply change the font of the original text to something else and back to Times New Roman, it'll look more pale and thin! Crazy.

Why, Adobe, why!!!

Ideas? Thank you!

 

[Steltek]

I suspect this is a font substitution issue where the version of the Times New Roman font used in the ebook may be different from the one installed on your system.

If the ebook doesn't have embedded fonts, Acrobat is substituting the font installed on your system for the original font in the document when you edit the text. Since the fonts don't exactly match, the result doesn't look quite the same.

You might be able to tell if this is happening by doing the following:

With the original and edited text present in the document, go to the Files menu. Hit Properties, then in the document properties display that comes up hit the Fonts tab. This should show all the fonts used in the document. If there are two Times New Roman fonts shown, then this is your problem.

 

[SoftwareEng]

I suspect this is a font substitution issue where the version of the Times New Roman font used in the ebook may be different from the one installed on your system.

If the ebook doesn't have embedded fonts, Acrobat is substituting the font installed on your system for the original font in the document when you edit the text. Since the fonts don't exactly match, the result doesn't look quite the same.

You might be able to tell if this is happening by doing the following:

With the original and edited text present in the document, go to the Files menu. Hit Properties, then in the document properties display that comes up hit the Fonts tab. This should show all the fonts used in the document. If there are two Times New Roman fonts shown, then this is your problem.

Steltek, thank you!

Insanity... Properties -> Fonts dialog shows a long list of identical Times New Roman rows. I think you're exactly right: the doc's author used a slightly diff. variation of the font. I downloaded another Times New Roman font (TTF), and it looks slightly different still. Do you know how to get the font's unique "id" so I can try to find that exact one online?

Thanks!

 

[Steltek]

Honestly, I don't know of a way to do that. It might help to know what application generated the ebook, though I suspect you might not have access to that information since you are editing the book in PDF and not in the original format.

I do know it is possible to extract embedded font files from PDFs with certain tools, but your problem here is that the font at issue likely isn't embedded (or is embedded as a subset only) which is what is causing your editing issue in the first place.

Can you extract a single page from the ebook with a sentence or two of sample text in the font you are trying to edit, save it as a PDF, and post it here as an attachment? Out of curiosity, I'll see if it does the same thing when I try to edit it in Acrobat Pro XI (I have like a thousand fonts installed on my system from forms editing, so I can at least see if it might match the one on my system or not).