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Participant
September 11, 2023
Question

Copying text in PDF sometimes pasted as gibberish.

  • September 11, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 1358 views

Hi All,

Sometimes when I copy and paste text from a PDF file into anything, the pasted text becomes gibberish in the form of "Максимален капацитет" (for reference this text means "maximum capacity"), or cannot be pasted at all, making me have to waste time copying text again with the hopes of it pasting properly.
I initially thought the problem only occured with cyrillic characters, but the font I use, Minion Pro, supports cyrillic.

I suppose I should emphasize the fact that all this happens when I copy- paste text sometimes. The odds are 1 to 3 on whether the text is pasted normally, pasted in gibberish, or not pasted at all.

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1 reply

Legend
September 11, 2023

The PDF viewer is always the same and the target application changes when copying? My best guess then would be that the text is saved as unicode in the PDF and either the text attributes go lost on copy & paste or the target application cannot cope with unicode.

Participant
September 11, 2023

Thank you for the reply,
Seems like I wasn't clear enough in my initial post. After I copy the text from the PDF file, it doesn't matter where I paste it, be it a browser page, a text file, or even the same PDF, the pasted text is sometimes just pasted as gibberish.
Just now I also got some sort of error I haven't seen before, "There was an error while copying to the Clipboard. An internal error occured.".
I will still check the encoding, if it's unicode, maybe that's somehow screwing with Acrobat, so thanks for the tip.

Legend
September 11, 2023

The same PDF is something else. That shouldn't be, unless it's a bug. It seems to lose the text attributes (font etc.) when pasted. Sorry, no idea why and how this comes.