FAQs

Square Box Characters Showing up in PDF Text When Saving a Job Report Using Adobe Acrobat PDF Viewer

Last Updated: Friday, March 14th 2025

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This applies to users who have Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader  to view the PDF Job Reports in Motivity.

If you are finding that when you save the PDF to your computer and re-open it to find text replaced with square box characters then this may help sort the problem out.

Open up the Adobe PDF application on your computer.

Click Edit> Preferences and go to "Documents" (This is inside of Adobe) unckeck the "Save As optimizes for Fast Web View.

You may also need to close your browser and re-open it again for it to take effect.

(It appears that Adobe is removing some of the embedded fonts from the PDF documents so is then unable to display the characters when re-opening it)

Article here provides more info:-
https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/text-looks-like-a-bunch-of-squares-and-and-junk/td-p/11068773

We have had reports of this happening when users are trying to merge multiple reports using Adobe too.

The most likely cause for this is embedded fonts missing from one of the PDFs being merged.

To be on the safe side it appears best to make sure PDFs only use Arial font as this is embedded as standard

Article on merging issue here:-
https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/adobe-acrobat-standard-dc-strange-square-characters-when-combining-multiple-pdf-documents/m-p/12641780