It turns up in logos and headlines from design apps, and in scans, image exports and some flattened files. The lettering looks like text, but nothing selects, searches or copies it, and it cannot be edited as text.

Why do design apps convert text to outlines?

To send a file that does not depend on fonts. Adobe describes InDesign’s command: “Use the Create Outlines command to keep the appearance while removing font dependency and enabling full shape editing.” And the cost: “After conversion, you can’t edit the text or adjust typography settings, so save a copy first.” Outlined type prints as it looks, with one difference Adobe notes: “When you convert type to outlines, it loses font hinting, data that helps text render clearly at small sizes or low resolutions.”

Can you convert the text of a PDF to outlines?

Usually it is done in the design app before export, with a command such as InDesign’s Create Outlines, which Adobe describes as a way “to turn characters into editable shapes for logos, headlines, or custom designs.” Keep a copy with live text: PDF Textfix cannot edit the outlined result, and changing the words later means going back to that copy.

How can you tell on a Mac?

Try to select a word: if nothing selects, or a block of picture does, the lettering is not text. (A viewer that recognizes text in images may offer a selection, but those characters come from recognition, not from the file.) On the command line, pdffonts lists a page’s fonts and pdftotext its text. We rendered the demo invoice to an image and wrapped it in a PDF; the copy has no fonts, no words and one picture:

$ pdffonts invoice-image-only.pdf
name                                 type              encoding         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
$ pdftotext invoice-image-only.pdf - | wc -w
       0
$ pdfimages -list invoice-image-only.pdf
   1     0 image    1240  1755  icc     3   8  jpeg   yes        5  0   150   150  146K 2.3%

The original prints 111 words. Outlines show the same way: on a test page we drew with its heading as glyph outlines and its body as one line of text, pdffonts listed only the body line’s font, and pdftotext returned “Served from noon to three” without the heading.

Can you edit outlined text in PDF Textfix?

There is nothing to edit as text. PDF Textfix lists only lines drawn with a font, so such lettering has no line to select. When a page holds only images, the Lines pane says “This page is a scanned image”; when it holds only shapes, “No Text on These Pages”, with “The pages on screen hold images or outlines only.” A Type 3 font, whose characters are drawings, is different: its lines are listed but locked.

How do you change outlined or rasterized text?

Ask for the source file, or a PDF exported with live text, and change it there. Text recognition adds a hidden text layer to a scan, but editing that layer does not change the picture (Edit text in a scanned PDF). Can’t select or copy text in a PDF covers other causes.

Questions about outlined text

Can you convert outlines back to text?

Not as such: the shapes hold no characters. Retype the words, or run text recognition, which reads the shapes as a picture and guesses the characters.

Can you convert text to outlines in Acrobat?

Adobe documents it as part of transparency flattening in Acrobat Pro: its help says the flattener option Convert All Text To Outlines “Converts all type objects (point type, area type, and path type) to outlines and discards all type glyph information on pages containing transparency.”

  • Glyph, the shape a font draws for a character.
  • Type 3 font, whose characters are drawings but still listed as text.