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garyp3496468
Participant
March 28, 2017
Question

Copy/paste text from PDF displays gibberish in Word

  • March 28, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 7194 views

When I save pdf documents from the web and then try to copy sections of the text from them into Microsoft Word documents, most of the time but not always the pasted text is unusable because all of the characters are distorted into unusable font. If I copy and paste directly from the same pdf document from the web without saving it, I don't have any problem. As a result, I cannot effectively use pdf documents saved from the web and have to go back on line to find these documents if I want to copy text from them.

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    2 replies

    Participating Frequently
    March 24, 2020

    Try selecting the text, right-clicking it, and choosing "copy with formatting". This works for me.

    Meenakshi_Negi
    Legend
    March 28, 2017

    Hi garyp3496468,

    This issue seems to be the font related.

    If the fonts of PDF don't have Unicode tables and do not use standard encoding for mapping the glyph indices to characters then you get garbage characters during copy/paste.

    Also, there is a possibility the fonts used to create the PDF file are not available on your system.

    Please try to embed fonts using the PDF fixups under profiles in the Preflight tool.

    Refer the steps provided in this help link: Reembedding Fonts in a PDF

    Let us know if you if that helps you.

    Regards,

    Meenakshi

    ~graffiti
    Legend
    March 28, 2017

    meenakshin83966505  wrote

    Please try to embed fonts using the PDF fixups under profiles in the Preflight tool.

    Refer the steps provided in this help link: Reembedding Fonts in a PDF

    Regards,

    Meenakshi

    Which is only available in the full, paid-for version of Acrobat and not the free Acrobat Reader...