Adobe Acrobat – Why Fonts Look Messed Up

I have acrobat reader pro (windows) v8, but a quick google search indicates that reader standard may also include the "touch-up text" tool. In my install, it is in the tools menu under "advanced". The tool allows for selecting text, choosing "properties" and picking a new typeface. On the one doc I tried, each section of text was a separate layout box, and I was unable to select all and change it globally. It may be possible, but I did not dig further.

I also found this link:

http://www.linux-archive.org/debian-user/322514-font-substitution-acroread.html

Which may provide some useful information. The person located several locations that acroread was checking for fonts. Plus, if you can find out what the font name is that acrobat is looking for, you can create an alias.

> I managed that by creating
> ~/.fonts.conf file with the following
> content.
> 
> *** <fontconfig> <alias binding="same">
> <family>Helvetica</family> <prefer>
> <family>Arial</family> </prefer>
> </alias> </fontconfig>
> ***

Believe it or not, the answer to the problem was to close the other open PDFs in Adobe Acrobat. I concurrently had 5-6 separate PDFs open at once. Besides this one problematic one, all of the others flowed and scrolled through flawlessly.

After closing all of them and then just opening this one PDF, I suspect that there's a specific renderer that Acrobat isn't able to "multitask", and thus was choking on this one document.