Text copied from a PDF doesn't wrap text when pasted into InDesign

Question

I'm hoping someone has a quick solution for this issue.

I've been trying to troubleshoot copy/pasting features from a PDF (specifically documents exported from InDesign). When I copy text from a PDF document and paste it into a new InDesign document, the copied text will sometimes paste with wrapped text and other times it will paste with forced line breaks (the same way that it appears in the PDF - WYSIWYG [What You See is What You Get]). And not only is it random from document to document, but sometimes it is random when text is copied from the same PDF. I copied three paragraphs from a PDF and when I pasted it into InDesign, each line break as it appeared in the PDF was forced to a new line with a paragraph return; yet, I copied other large amounts of text from the same document and it pasted with wrapped text. I always paste unformatted text in InDesign and when I create a PDF from InDesign, I always export to a PDF rather than print to a PDF. Am I missing a command on the Export or in Acrobat?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance:)

Carla

BobLevine · Accepted Answer

Why not copy from the original InDesign document? You can try playing around with the tagged vs not tagged PDF which may or may not help.

James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

Text in PDF is not always completely WYSI, and might use any combination of line break types in a given (visual) paragraph. That's one issue to consider. There's also no such thing as 'text flow' in a PDF, so every line has some kind of break at the end, even just a line return. It sounds as if different paste options and apps are interpreting the clipboard contents differently. Try pasting the material into something neutral like Notepad to see how it's handled there, without any 'helper' routines removing line breaks or turning them into paragraph returns, etc.

The export stage should have very little to do with it. None of the options I'm aware of manage how text is structured.

You are aware of the many settings for clipboard handling under Preferences?

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