Lines of text overlap. Columns sit on top of each other. Headers crash into paragraphs. The PDF was a normal document yesterday and now looks like a ransom note.
What's actually going wrong
Font substitution. The PDF references fonts your viewer doesn't have, falls back to a wider replacement, and text reflows badly. Bad export. The source app produced a PDF with broken text positioning metadata. Render bug. Your viewer is misinterpreting valid positioning instructions.
Quick test: open the PDF in a different viewer (browser, mobile). If it looks fine there, your desktop viewer is the issue. If it looks broken everywhere, the file's positioning data is broken.
The quick fix
Re-export from source if you have it. The source app's PDF export is far better than any post-hoc fix.
If you only have the broken PDF, convert to Word — Flint's OCR reads visible text and rebuilds layout. The Word doc gives you clean text you can format properly, then export back to PDF.
If that didn't work
For PDFs where layout is critical and conversion damages it further, convert to JPG page-by-page, then convert images to PDF. The rasterised version preserves visible layout exactly but loses searchable text.
For documents where missing fonts are the root cause, the only real fix is re-exporting from source with 'Embed all fonts' enabled.
Prevent it next time
Always embed fonts when exporting to PDF. Use standard fonts (Helvetica, Times, Arial) for documents that will be opened on unknown systems. And keep source documents for anything you might need to re-export.
FAQ
Why does my PDF look different in different viewers?
Font substitution — different viewers have different fallback fonts. Embed fonts at export and the document looks identical everywhere.
Can I fix misaligned text without rebuilding?
Not really. Once positioning is broken in the file, there's no in-place repair. Conversion via Word or rasterisation via JPG are the practical recovery routes.
Will my converted Word doc look exactly like the broken PDF?
It'll look like what the PDF was trying to show — cleaner than the broken render, structured by paragraph. Manual adjustment in Word is sometimes needed for complex layouts.
What does 'embed fonts' mean exactly?
The PDF includes the font data itself rather than just referencing the font by name. The file is slightly larger but renders identically everywhere because the fonts travel with it.
Broken layout calls for rebuild. Convert via Flint and the document comes back clean.