Participant

Question

Only the OCR-text of a single page can be copied of a multiple page pdf

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
November 12, 2025
2 replies
162 views

I can process a multi-page PDF document using OCR in Acrobat Reader Pro. During the process, I see messages indicating that all pages are being analyzed with OCR.

However, when I try to select the recognized text using Ctrl+A, only the visible text on the current page is highlighted, and the rest of the pdf-document is ignored. When I copy the text, only the highlighted portion is copied.

My goal is to copy all the OCR-recognized text from the entire PDF document, not just the current page.

How can I achieve this?
Is there maybe a workaround, such as using a VBA Excel macro to extract the text page by page from the complete PDF file with OCR of Acrobat Reader Pro?

K

kees_5028Author

Participant

LS,

I have solved the issue in the following manner:

Execute the OCR-process
Export the pdf as a RTF-file
Open it with Word
Save as TXT file
Clean the TXT file with a Notepad++ macro

That does the trick.

Kind regards,

Kees

K

kees_5028Author

Participant

Hi,

I am testing the process of exporting a PDF file to an RTF format after the OCR-process is being executed, see my previous post.
I have now to conclude that this does not resolve all my issues.

In one of my tests I noticed the following:

As a test I use Adobe reader pro to search for a specific character string, for which I know that it is part of an imbedded screenshot within the pdf-file. And then the search function can find it.
However when I export the PDF to an RTF file, that character string is no longer available.

How can I export all text that is searchable in the PDF to a text-based file?

Thanks in advance for support!

Kind regards,

Kees

Souvik Sadhu

Community Manager

Hi @kees_5028,

Hope you are doing well. Thanks for writing in!

If your only goal is to copy text from the document, have you tried exporting it?

What you can do is:

Perform OCR as you normally would, then go to Menu > Export PDF > Text (plain).

This should export all the text in the document for you to copy and paste it as per your requirement.

Let us know if this is what you were looking for.

Regards,
Souvik.

K

kees_5028Author

Participant

Hi Souvik,

Thank you very much for your analysis.

I’ve reviewed your suggested solution, but unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work as expected.

The PDF contains both simple text and screenshots with text. While the regular text is recognized correctly, the text within the screenshots is ignored when I follow your approach.

But OCR can recognize the text in the screenshots, after running the OCR process, when I try to select and copy the content using Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C, but it only captures the simple text and the text of the screenshots for the currently visible page, not for the entire PDF document.

Do you have any alternative suggestions or approaches that might resolve this issue?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Kind regards,

Kees

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