Text not selectable in PDF printout

[lothar buettner]

Hello,

I have loaded a document in XChange Viewer Build 210 which has fonts embedded:
Arial (Embedded Subset)
Arial Bold (Embedded Subset)

When I print the document using the PDF-XChange Printer driver the output doesn't show any embedded fonts nor is the text selectable by the selection tool.

I have tried various settings in the printer driver "font" menue with no effect.

I do the printout instead of saving because I wish to place 4 pages on a single sheet.

Could you please point me to the right direction?
Thank you
Lothar

P.S.: I am running Windows 7 32 bit

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi Lothar,

Thanks for the post - could you please upload the file in a .zip folder for me to take a look at?
If the file contains material that you don't want available to other users on here, or your serial key, but you are still willing to send, then please send to support@pdf-xchange.com, with a link back to this forum topic in the email and I'll take a look.

Cheers,
Will

[lothar buettner]

Hello Will,

thank's for your fast response. I have attached a zip file.

Lothar

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi Lothar,

Thanks for getting that to me - I've taken a look and I see what's going on; when a PDF Viewer/Reader prints text, it will sometimes render the text as an image, though whether or not it does this is dependent upon what fonts are used. This is normal.

Also, if the original PDF had been OCR'd, then there is still the image of text underneath the layer of invisible text that the Viewer OCR places. Re-printing will miss this invisible layer, rendering the text of the output document non-selectable (hopefully that's a word. If not, let's make it one ). Hopefully you understand what is meant here.

Re-printing a PDF document to a PDF converter is not really recommended, as image quality can be reduced, as can text quality. The upside of printing a PDF to a PDF printer/converter is that the file size can be reduced, sometimes dramatically.

Hope that helps!

[lothar buettner]

Hi Will,

the whole idea of printing the PDF was to merge 4 pages of the original PDF to one page. This way I can have the picture to the left and the corresponding part numbers to the right (in the file I uploaded).

Do you know of a workaround?

Have a nice weekend
Lothar

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi Lothar,

If the text/image quality is acceptable to you after printing, then you could use the OCR function under the Documents menu to make the text seletable/searchable? That's probably the easiest way for you to accomplish this.

[GDUSER]

I tag along this old discussion because its title describes the issue that I have:
When I print a webpage from Google Chrome to a PDF file using the 'PDF-XChange Standard' printer, all text is converted to an image which I cannot select to copy, or search through afterwards. Whereas if I print the same webpage using Chrome's built-in 'Save as PDF' option, all text in the webpage is preserved and I can perform searches, select and copy, and even edit the text in PDF-XChange Editor afterwards.
I played around with several different settings in the PDF-XChange Standard Printing Defaults window, including Compression and Fonts settings, but I couldn't get it to generate a searchable text PDF file.
Is there any way that I can get the PDF-XChange Standard printer to generate a searchable text PDF file from Chrome?
Note that if if weren't for this issue, I prefer to use the PDF-XChange Standard printer over Chrome's Save as PDF option because the former gives me more options when saving files (e.g. overwrite, append before or after, auto number).
Another twist is that if I print the same webpage from Internet Explorer sending the output to PDF-XChange Standard, all text is preserved in the final PDF file. But I prefer to use Google Chrome because of a number of reasons (speed, integration with other systems that I use, etc.). I just can't get the ideal combination of Chrome and PDF-XChange Standard to work together.

Software versions that I am running:
Windows 7 Professional Service pack 1
PDF-XChange Standard version 7.0 (Build 328.2) Jan 28 2019
Google Chrome Version 78.0.3904.108 (Official Build) (32-bit)
Internet Explorer version 11.0.9600.19431 update versions: 11.0.140 (KB4511872)

Thank you

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello GDUSER,

Unfortunately this issue is caused by Google Chrome itself, not our printer. Chrome chooses to send "shape" information instead of font information. What this means is that there is not actual "text" for us to place in the document during printing. Unfortunately this is not something that can be resolved from our end, and you will see the same issue using any printer from google chrome.

My suggestion would be to contact Google directly about this and ask them to offer a way to print with font information, the more their users request it, the sooner they will implement it.

Kind regards,