Cannot copy-paste text from a PDF.

Question

I know this is an old post, but I wanted to share a recent experience that might be useful. Yesterday, I ran into an issue where I couldn’t copy text from a PDF sent by a client. Surprisingly, the file had no restrictions or passwords, yet I couldn’t extract the text. I tried everything I could think of, converting the PDF to Word and using various OCR tools but nothing worked.
 
Here’s the workaround that saved the day:
 
1. Convert the PDF to TIFF using an online converter.2. Convert the TIFF to WORD format.3. Convert the WORD back to PDF.4. Finally, run OCR on the new PDF and voilà! You’ll now be able to highlight and copy the text.
 
I hope this trick helps!

gary_sc · Answer

Hi, @Michael Angel38808268tt99. Can you please try an experiment for me, please? Try this again, but drop step #2. If you open a TIFF document into Acrobat it will do two things: 1) convert the document to a non-searchable PDF, and then #2) automatically initiate the OCR process.

TIFF format is the only format that Acrobat will automatically do that. I will not do that if the image format is a JPG, PNG, GIF, or PDF.

Basically, I'm trying to see if step #2 is necessary. As such the revised process would be

#1) Convert the PDF to TIFF using an online converter or "Acrobat's Export as…"

#2) Open the TIFF document in Acrobat

#3) After OCR is complete, test to see if you can copy the text in the document.

Let me know if this works or not; I'm curious. Thank you.

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