Skip to main content
V
Vasubandu
Participant
June 13, 2021
Question

Can someone point in a direction where I can make sense of this insanity?

  • June 13, 2021
  • 5 replies
  • 1453 views

I just went to Acrobat Pro DC because everything I read said it made sense, and over more than a dozen hours, nothing about it has made any sense at all to me. Ever since we went to 32 bit software, I have been able to noodle my way around new apps and generally understand them. 

 

After hours of searching, I have no idea how to copy text from a PDF file and paste it into Word. That is something I do 20 or more times a day, and in Foxit, Soda, and Nitro to name a few I know exactly how to do that. In fact, I did not need to look up any instructions. All I find with my searches for the Adobe answer is people complaining here that they can't find it or what used to work no longer does.

 

What happened to OCR as a function? OK, I click on Edit and it will OCR whether I want it to or not. And it gives me text boxes all over the place. The document was a document, not text boxes. I have no idea how to fix it. And can I select text the same way I do in Word, Chrome and every other civilized file or do I have to select areas or bits and pieces.

 

I am sure all this makes sense so someone out there. I know that the problem is me. ButI need a way in. Can anyone tell me if it is possible as an attorney to be able to transparently work with Acrobat Pro DC without thinking about it all the time? Because it if will be just be part of the background, I need to run while I can.

 

Thanks for any guidance, and I apologize for the attitude. I am just so 

This topic has been closed for replies.

5 replies

JR Boulay
Community Expert
JR BoulayCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 14, 2021

Acrobat was designed in the early 90s and hasn't really evolved since despite some cosmetic changes to the interface.

 

You just have to use the form editor to be convinced, you have to open up to 3 dialog boxes and click OK 4 times to change a simple property, and I wrote "click OK" because that does not work with the keyboard (bug reported since Acrobat 8 in 2008 and still awaiting fixup).

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe
Document Geek
Community Expert
Document GeekCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 13, 2021

This may help as well: https://documentgeek.blogspot.com/2017/11/acrobats-mysterious-and-frustrating.html

    V
    VasubanduAuthor
    Participant
    June 13, 2021

    Thanks so much for this, and it has me thinking of just bailing on this whole project. What kind of company does that to its users? I don't care what other programs Adobe has. For me, PDF is about text. I need it to be invisible and intuitive. 98% of what I do is OCR, copy and paste, but these days everyone wants to force me onto the cloud with layers of security. They want to worm their way into every aspect of my life and control digital signatures. 

     

    Perhaps I should look into older versions of the software. Was there a time when it made sense and was intuitive to use?

    JR Boulay
    Community Expert
    JR BoulayCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 13, 2021

    1. Select text

    Start here: https://helpx.adobe.com/content/help/en/acrobat/using/edit-text-pdfs.html

     

    2. OCR

    Start here: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/edit-scanned-pdfs.html

    Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe
    V
    VasubanduAuthor
    Participant
    June 13, 2021

    Been there, done that. You may notice the absence of a simple "How to copy and paste from a PDF document" tutorial. As for OCR, it says "Choose Tools > Edit PDF. Acrobat automatically applies OCR to your document and converts it to a fully editable copy of your PDF." And that is partly right part of the time, I told it to make all pages editable, and it did at first, but now won't. Of course, if I had an OCR button, I could just OCR the whole document, but apparently I am not worthy. 

     

    As an attorney, I write for a living. I know how to communicate, but the people at Adobe do not. They have some of the most opaque instructions I have ever encountered. Again, why do people put up with this? I am at wit's end, and I am a person with moderate software skills. I can adapt to new systems but they have to make sense. The scary thing is that every time I have a question and do a Google search, I find countless other people with the same problem. It is not just me.

     

     

      Bernd Alheit
      Community Expert
      Bernd AlheitCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      June 13, 2021

      Activate the select tool and then select the text.

      V
      VasubanduAuthor
      Participant
      June 13, 2021

      Thanks, but I think I have done that. I actually managed to get the select tool in the bar at the top of the screen (no idea why it was not there to begin with). But it still just selects an area and not the text. And it will not copy and paste. That has me wondering if the document has had OCR. If I had a simple OCR button like every other PDF program that woudl be nice. My understanding was that when I clicked the Edit button it would automatically OCR. As I said, that seems to creat a lot of text boxes. And well glory be, now it is working, or at least it is working in some parts of the document but not others. 

       

      OK this is very weird. I just was able to select text on the first page of the document and then select down to parts of the next page. The document has footers, and it did not select them, just the text itself. Perfect. Then I clicked in the second page, and suddenly I am back to selecting only areas in the second page. I can still select text in the first page, but when I scroll down it selects the footer and will not select text on page 2. I did absolutely nothing to change anything. 

       

      When I scroll down a few pages, there are indviduial words that I can select, and if I start with one it selects that word and then captures additonal individual words as I try to select more. What on earth is going on?

       

      Why is this so hard, and why does anyone put up with it? 

      V
      VasubanduAuthor
      Participant
      June 13, 2021

      I just have to say that when I finally sort of figured out how to get a select function, it would only select an area not text. So I went to Google and searched for "Acrobat Pro DC can't select text" and all I saw was an endless stream of posts from people who could not figure out how to select text instead of an area. So I narrow it to the last year and there were still over a thousand with exactly that complaint. What is going on here? Do people really have the time to try to figure out how to do the most basic things?

      Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
      Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices