PDF text as image

Question

Hello all,

I've searched this issue but have yet to yield satisfying answer. After opening a PDF that was sent from someon else, part of the document gets sent as a normal PDF, but half gets sent as an image of the text making editing or highlighting futile. I've tried several things to convert it to text but have found no resolution. I see other people have inquired to this issue going back several years. Has anyone found a reliable fix?

Karl Heinz Kremer · Answer

It is not that half gets sent as text and half gets sent as image - when the PDF was produced, half of it was an image in the original application. This could be because that part was a scanned image, or because it came from an application that converted the text to "outlines". If it was a scanned image, you should be able to OCR (optical character recognition) the document and get it converted to text (there are different options, resulting in different quality level of what you see, but all will result in you being able to select text). If it was converted to outlines, you are unfortunately out of luck - at least without some additional work: You can save the whole page as an image (high quality, e.g. 600dpi TIFF image), and then import this image into Acrobat and then run OCR. This should then convert all of the page to selectable text.

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