PDF text format

Question

I have a PDF and I want to copy some of the text out of the PDF for processing.

However, whenever I paste the text to Word or another editor, it turns into gibberish. In the actual PDF, it is normal alphabet font. When I go and edit text, and go to format the text, I see the text as T5 or T1 format. When I select all the Text inside the PDF and change it to Arial (for example) it turns into gibberish again.

I tried to print the PDF to another PDF to see if I can flatten it that way and nothing. Are there any solution here?

Bonus question - how did this happen?

try67 · Answer

This is caused by an incorrect font encoding. You will probably not be able to search the PDF file for text, either. What you see on the screen does not match the actual code characters that are used behind the scenes.

To solve this you can try the following: Export all the pages of the file to image files. Use a high resolution lossless format, such as PNG. Then create a new file from those PNG files, and run Text Recognition on it. If successful, the text in the new file should be searchable and copiable to other applications.

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