These forums are now Read Only. If you have an Acrobat question, ask questions and get help from one of our experts.

Read Out Loud - gibberish

Forum Index > Accessibility > Read Out Loud - gibberish
2009-10-08 04:35:40
anno1878
Registered: Oct 8 2009
Posts: 7

Using Acrobat Standard v7 and when using Read Out Loud for one document I'm getting what sounds like a load of gibberish ('Number sign, number sign, percecent, number sign, asterisk plus, slash...')

Works ok for other documents. Is the documented corrupted? If so, any solutions on how to 'uncorrupt' it.

Many thanks
Anno1878

My Product Information:
Acrobat Standard 7.0, Windows
Top
2009-10-08 14:24:47
#1
daka630
Expert
Registered: Mar 1 2007
Posts: 1420
Hi Anno 1878
Without an actual look-see of the PDF, from quarantine as it were, I cannot offer anything conclusive.
Perhaps you could open an account at acrobat.com (free), upload the PDF and share the link to it here.

Regardless, Read Out Loud, being a fairly straight forward text-to-speech "app" is giving you what's available to it from the PDF.
Perhaps OCR text of a scanned image of text?
Sort of a "gigo" situation as text-to-speech does not "add" anything to what it is given.

Be well...

Be well...

Top
2009-10-13 02:33:11
#2
anno1878
Registered: Oct 8 2009
Posts: 7
Thanks daka630 for your time and comments.

The master file has been uploaded again and seems to be working so can be read online, which has solved the immediate problem. However, the user does have trouble then downloading it - the file becomes corrupted - but we do have other options available. So problem solved, although not in the most effective way.

Thanks again
anno1878
Top
2009-10-13 05:12:33
#3
UVSAR
Expert
Registered: Oct 29 2008
Posts: 1357
The usual reason for gibberish is that the font encoding is broken, so the human-readable letters on screen make sense but the text stored in the PDF is made of seemingly-random glyphs. ROL uses the glyphs, not what they happen to look like, when deciding what to say.
Top
2009-10-13 07:37:58
#4
anno1878
Registered: Oct 8 2009
Posts: 7
UVSAR wrote:
The usual reason for gibberish is that the font encoding is broken,
UVSAR - thanks for that which seems to fit the 'symptoms'. Being a near complete IT dunce, do you have a 'remedy'?

Thanks again
anno1878
Top
2009-10-13 08:22:03
#5
UVSAR
Expert
Registered: Oct 29 2008
Posts: 1357
Remedy - not really, as it tends to be a fault caused by either the typeface or the software sending the Postscript to Distiller. Some combinations just don't work, and once the PDF is built that way you can't fix it. A few people use it intentionally to protect their documents from extraction and indexing by Googlebot, however as it's not a feature there's no button to toggle it.

Whenever we receive a PDF that has to be accessible and we're not certain it came from a proven workflow, we export it as a text file. If it comes out as junk, it's going to ROL as junk.
Top
2009-10-13 08:31:11
#6
anno1878
Registered: Oct 8 2009
Posts: 7
UVSAR wrote:
Whenever we receive a PDF that has to be accessible and we're not certain it came from a proven workflow, we export it as a text file. If it comes out as junk, it's going to ROL as junk.
And so it does with my file!
Cheers
anno1878
Top
2009-11-09 15:22:14
#7
TheAquarian
Registered: Nov 9 2009
Posts: 4
I've had this problem before as well... I'm willing to bet that if you copy and paste the text from acrobat to notepad you'll see the "gibberish" text. I don't know why some publishing companies do this, but in some e-books there will be characters that are not readily visible on your screen that are no less a part of the document and will be read with the rest of the text.
Top