Pdf copy and paste gibberish

Then you can use Chrome's search feature to find text, and copy-paste works correctly. I would like to vote up pipitas's comment on Shiki's answer, but I don't have the creds : The problem may be custom font encoding, not encryption. I found that I am able to easily copy and paste text from the original uncompressed PDF file, but after running that PDF through a Reduce File Size filter I created, the resulting compressed PDF doesn't copy paste clearly comes out looking like the strings you posted.

So, this is not totally helpful in your case, presuming that your PDF file was received from elsewhere and you can't get to the original version, if it was indeed compressed in some way. But that might be the explanation - that the file was mangled somehow in an effort to reduce the file size. These are two documents both generated at the same time with Filemaker Pro 11 on Mac - I can't imagine they would have different encodings or any such thing.

Just print the document using CutePdf, Adobe 2 Pdf printer or any similar stuff. The bottom line is, that you need to print into the pdf format. Do similar, but save as image png, tiff, There is a risk that the information won't be retrievable at all.

PDF documents are essentially one document overlying another, one simple text, the other a picture. When you copy and paste from the document, you mark the text while looking at the picture, but what is copied to your clipboard is the corresponding piece of the text part.

Depending on the way the document is created, the quality and availability of the text part can differ greatly. If you save a word processor document in PDF format, using Acrobat, Word, a PDF printer driver or any other method, the quality will usually be excellent, since the text file can be created from the text of the original.

Some special characters may become distorted, but plain text is usually fine. If the document is created from a scanned image, however, the text part is typically created by OCR processing of the image, which can produce rather sorry results, especially if the original is less than optimal for the purpose. A bad program used to create the PDF, or the wrong settings, might also cause the text part to become completely garbled, as could, perceivably, some kinds of encryption run on the file after it has been created.

The bottom line is, if the text part of the document is really bad, there is no way to make it better. Your best bet would be to remove the text part altogether, and have the program redo the OCR process. I think that might be doable from within Acrobat, but I'm not entirely sure. One possible reason for this could be that font embedding in the PDF was using a custom encoding, which is not correctly applied when copying text from the PDF.

I tried on my Mac and didn't find any issue. Then I tried Adobe Reader on my Mac an faced the same effect. To me it looks like:. I can't say this for sure, but it would explain my observation. First I thought it would be more logical to encode the embedded font subset as contiguous entries instead of leaving holes inside and using the original character location.

But then I realized, that by using an encoding vector to the font subset with original entries, characters which are often used can have less bits set to 1 in their byte and can be compressed in a better way it may lower the entrophy of the overall text this way. This thread with accepted answer to same issue explains this with a working example. I have not tried the Google Docs option as it is still not supported in my office.

But hey, you still have the original PDF file to compare with and offset those parts that just can't be fixed. Saves time from typing the whole thing. My 2c. For each of the separate pages, I could search, copy and export text correctly from Adobe Reader on the Mac. That problem brought me here. The posts here gave me some good pointers thank you! I looked at the file properties for fonts. The file combined in Preview where copied text is garbled showed encoding for most of the fonts as "Built-in" with a few as "Roman.

The solution to my problem was under my nose all the time — the Scansoft program itself can combine files. Thanks, posters! I know this doesn't explain the Windows-only problems — unless the PDF had similar mixed origins? Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. In this setting, the author or distributor of the PDF file does not allow you to make a duplicate of their content.

Right-click the image and choose an option to copy the image to the clipboard or to a new file. Drag the image into an open document in another application. Right-click the document, and choose Select Tool from the pop-up menu.

Drag to select text, or click to select an image. Right-click the selected item, and choose Copy. Once saved, open the PDF in any reader, and you can copy and paste the text using the steps mentioned above. Right-click the document in the primary window and choose Select Tool from the menu that appears. Drag to select the text you want to copy. Right-click the selection, then select Copy With Formatting. Test your viewers with it, if you can paste unicode chars in the range, creating a special font should work with that viewer.

I was away from home, just returned and tested mupdf on Win 7 and Ubuntu The same problem persists on copying. I am not sure, what I am doing wrong. I tried your PDF on all my viewers as well. No luck. I'm on Debian, which is very close to Ubuntu, and mupdf works fine shift-right button to select. Where were you pasting it into?

Can you do a xclip -o hexdump -C from the commandline on the selection and post the results? Packages xclip , bsdmainutils if not installed. Also, can you post what exactly are the results for my PDF with the various viewers? A tool like inside clipboard helps, IIRC it also shows hex. Show 7 more comments. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog. Podcast Making Agile work for data science.

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