A user recently informed me that they were receiving an error message when they tried to view a PDF that apparently had Chinese characters in its text. The message they received was:
The Simplified Chinese Language Support Package is required to display this page properly. Under the current configuration, this resource is not available.
I was aware of the foreign language font packs on the Adobe Reader Download page, so I downloaded them, installed them, and hoped that they would cross-over to work for Adobe Acrobat as well.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. If I downloaded the same PDF and tried to open it in Adobe Reader, it was successful but Adobe Acrobat still gave the message above. This wasn’t exactly user-friendly or convenient, so I kept looking. Adobe Acrobat gave no clues as to how change the “current configuration” to allow the Simplified Chinese Language support, though I believe this also would have affected PDFs with Japanese, Korean, or Chinese Traditional characters in them.
The actual solution to install the foreign language font pack involves running Adobe Acrobat as an administrator and opening a PDF with those foreign characters. You won’t even have to log the user off if you use the RunAs service. Navigate to the Adobe Acrobat executable and right-click on it (holding down shift may be required for some versions of Windows) and then select ‘Run as…’. When the next window comes up, log in with an account that will have admin credentials. After Acrobat launches, use File, Open… to view the PDF with foreign characters.
This time, upon opening the PDF, you’ll get a fairly longer error message (which would have helped the standard user) that explains to hit Ok to install the language component and Cancel to continue without installing it.
After you hit Ok and let the installation complete and restart it will reopen and your PDF will be viewable with the foreign characters. Before, it wasn’t just the foreign characters that weren’t viewable, but the entire PDF was blank.
You can also install the languages you need by going to the Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs and hitting the Modify button with Acrobat selected.
Now if I could only read what it said…