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Inspiring
June 26, 2025
Question

Why does Acrobat Pro generate garbled copied-text PDF from Edge?

  • June 26, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 1466 views

Greetings,

 

I've had this issue with Acrobat Pro and Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 (running on a Mac, via Boot Camp) for many years and on several computers (all Macs).

 

I'm running a completely clean installation of Windows 10, brand-new, recently formatted and installed using Boot Camp Assistant.  There's no way it has a corrupt font or anything.  (The only other software installed is Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, Autodesk AutoCad, Revit and 3ds Max, and OpenOffice.)

 

When I PDF from Microsoft Edge using Adobe Acrobat, the resulting PDF looks fine, but selecting text causes a huge selection highlight, and copy-pasting it leads to garbled characters.  See attached:

 

1. An article from a newspaper (it doesn't matter which web site it is, even my own webmail; they all cause the same problem).  

 

2. I PDF it using File - Print and Adobe Acrobat.

 

3. The resulting PDF looks fine.  But when I select any line, I get this huge blue highlight.

 

4. If I copy-paste that, the result is garbled text.

 

Acrobat works fine when PDFing from others applications.  Once again this is a problem I've had for years, on multiple computers.  I attach the garbled PDF.

1 reply

Bernd Alheit
Community Expert
Community Expert
June 26, 2025
  • In Acrobat export the pages as TIFF files
  • Combine the TIFF files as a new PDF file
  • Perform OCR on the new PDF file
JflemayAuthor
Inspiring
June 26, 2025

Um thank you but that doesn't answer my question, which is: why is Acrobat malfunctioning with Edge?  If I want to copy-paste the original text, I'll just go to the original text.  But I do want my PDFs to behave properly.

Meenakshi Negi
Community Manager
Community Manager
June 26, 2025

Hi Jflemay ,

 

Thank you for reaching out, and sorry about the trouble.

 

When creating a PDF using printing from the website, it converts to an image file. That is why you get the blue box when highlighting the text, and garbled text when copying it from the file. I hope this information helps you.

 

Thanks,

Meenakshi