Text is shown as picture when editing

Question

When opening up my PDF, and pressing Edit, the text is shown as pictures instead of text. Mostly, every word becomes a seperate picture. This means that I can't edit the text.

Any suggestions on how I can fix this problem?

Amal. · Accepted Answer

Hi there

Hope you are doing well and thanks for reaching out.

Is this an issue with a particular PDF file or with all the PDFs that you try to edit? Please try with a different PDF file and check.

It sounds like your PDF might be a scanned document or an image-based PDF rather than a text-based one. When you open it in Edit mode, Adobe automatically detects the content, but if the text appears as separate images, it likely means the document doesn't contain selectable text.

To fix this, try to Use OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

Open your PDF in Adobe Acrobat.
Click on Scan & OCR (found under the "Tools" tab).
Select Recognize Text and choose the appropriate language.
After the text is recognized, try editing again.

Let us know how it goes.

gary_sc · Answer

Hi Martina,

Which version of Acrobat are you using? Reader, Standard, or Pro.

Also, did you create the PDF or is this a PDF that you received or downloaded or whatever so you do not know how it was created.

Lastly, can you select text in the PDF when you drag across a sentence or the does the page turn blue?

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded