Chinese fonts in pdf not displaying properly after saving in Preview.

Thanks Tom. Yeah, I understand that PDFs are not designed to work like word-processing files, etc., and the need to have the Chinese text copy over well is really just to prove that the document is searchable (i.e. if it can copy a short section of text Ok, then it means the characters are recognized by the PDF reader and I can search the document, which is my main goal.)

The problem I mentioned with Preview, etc., is actually a new one; one that has become a big problem for me only in the last few weeks. Before, I never had this issue. I'm not sure what changed, but I was suspecting MacKeeper and their "language cluster" cleaning feature, where it "helps" you by removing unused fonts. Though, I can't quite confirm that this has played a role. I just completely reinstalled the OS thinking that this would fix the issue by installing all the original fonts again, if MacKeeper did indeed remove the fonts these PDF programs use when editing or saving PDF files. However.....unfortunately....the problem is still here.

So, that developer I mentioned in the first thread who said this is an OS X issue may indeed be correct.

And just to be clear, I have confirmed that the PDF's I working with do have the fonts embedded already. It is only when I alter them and then save or export from Preview, Skim, Nomad, etc., that the character information gets stripped out and I'm left with a document that one can read but cannot search. I can't even OCR it because this problem also affects my OCR software, as if it can't get access to the fonts needed to embed in the recognized PDF.

Any other thoughts? I'd appreciate any you have.

Hi Tom.

For what it is worth, I just got the response below from another forum I posted the question on (www.chinese-forums.com):

"...What I am seeing is characters are being re-mapped to code points in the "private use" UNICODE plane. For example, UNICODE U+662F '是' in the original PDF is being encoded as U+10FC54 in the exported PDF. That's something that might be done when special, non-standard characters or glyphs were used, but using the "private" space is not "portable" and certainly not necessary in this case. It seems like a bug that Apple should be told about."

I've forwarded the information to the Apple Care support folks I've been working with trying to figure out the problem. My hunch is that with the update to 10.8.1 in October last year, something regarding the Unicode PDF libraries went a bit funny, as it was not long after that I started seeing the issue (again, before I could easily edit Chinese PDFs and re-save them without difficulty). But it was really evident to me just this past week as I began to work heavily with some texts; so maybe the update to 10.8.2 in early February had soemthing to do with it instead / as well.