Adobe and international fonts problem

[AZZenny]

I have Adobe Reader 7.09something. Worked fine for a long time.

2-3 months ago, I enabled Hebrew language, right-to-left scripts, Hebrew Keyboard, and Unicode 8 so I could read and reply in Hebrew to emails from colleagues in Israel, and to practice my lessons. For a variety of complicated reasons having to do with AOL, Wordperfect, etc., I eventually discovered that composing and receiving in Arial, Times New Roman, and Tahoma are the only trustworthy fonts, and then only on Outlook Express or Wordpad. (Now, OK, I did blow the computer up a couple times trying to compose text that switched from English to Hebrew and back in the same page, but I stopped doing that pretty much.)

Suddenly, and only starting about 2 weeks ago, every pdf file I open with Adobe Reader has a scattering of Hebrew characters. Then a few days ago it started giving me an error message each time, saying 'the font ArialMT contains invalid coding. Some characters may not display.' Same message happened with Times New RomanMT font.

Anyone know what happened, and what I can do? I need to keep the Hebrew character options and ability to switch to a Hebrew keyboard. But I use Adobe a lot for work, and have to print out documents sent that way pretty often.

Should I completely delete and reload the basic Arial and TNR fonts from the computer itself, and maybe just keep Tahoma for bilingual use? I don't even see an Arial"MT" when I go to the Fonts section of the control panel, so is it internal to Adobe? I found nothing useful at Adobe's free helpsites.

תודה רבה!

 

[AZZenny]

OK, I got it fixed, I think. For such a critical business program, I'm amazed how hard it is to find any useful info.

I finally (after many lesser tries) had to remove every trace of Adobe products from the computer and then upgrade to Reader 8.0.

My internet sleuthing found that some variation of foreign or garbled font intrusion is not a rare problem. Any incompatibility in the versions of Adobe used to create a document and then to read it leads to Reader substituting internal Adobe ArialMT and TimesRomanMT (and a few others like Tahoma -- all Unicode-friendly) for un-embedded but formerly-safe fonts such as Helvetica. This is because font support systems changed significantly between older and newer versions of various Adobe products. Having other Adobe products on the computer with shared files potentially further messes it up.

THEN there comes a conflict between Microsoft and Adobe, where MS components try to take over font control -- apparently you can go along fine and then some new Windows update or new MS file or Adobe update will throw a monkeywrench in -- and when Adobe reaches for its own 'substitute' fonts, it gets intruded upon by the Windows system. It has something vaguely to do with Unicode, too, but it was way too technical for me.

Anyhow, no one much likes Adobe Reader 8.0, but they seem to have fixed the font bug.