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ainal71745830
Participant
Oct 20, 2020 12:01 PM UTC
Answered

PDF not selecting text properly (huge selection)

Can someone tell me why is this happening? I have a regular pdf file with text on, but whenever I try selecting a portion or highlighting it, it selects a giant portion as if the font size was giant. I tried the "recognize text" tool (OCR) but did nothing. It's also not the first file I encounter this problem with.

 

 

Thanks in advance.

try67
try67Correct answer
Community Expert
Oct 21, 2020 3:48 PM UTC

This is usually the result of an incorrect font encoding when the file is first created. I assume you have Acrobat because Reader can't do OCR. If that's the case one possible workaround is to re-create the file. Export all pages as images, then create a new PDF from those images and run Text Recognition on it. Hopefully that will solve it. You should also report this issue to the authors of the PDF file.

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8 replies

try67
Community Expert
try67Community ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
Oct 21, 2020 3:48 PM UTC

This is usually the result of an incorrect font encoding when the file is first created. I assume you have Acrobat because Reader can't do OCR. If that's the case one possible workaround is to re-create the file. Export all pages as images, then create a new PDF from those images and run Text Recognition on it. Hopefully that will solve it. You should also report this issue to the authors of the PDF file.

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    ainal71745830Author
    Participant
    Oct 23, 2020 9:23 AM UTC

    Thank you! It worked as you said, now I can finally select text properly. The quality dropped a little bit, but I guess that's because of the conversion from pdf to image file.

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