Cannot Select Text in Acrobat Professional DC

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
January 16, 2022
1 reply
3737 views

When I try to select text, I can't select an individual sentence or line but a much larger area gets selected automatically. If I copy the larger selected area and try to paste it in a document (e.g. a Word document) only garbage (like raw code) gets pasted. This happens only in pdf documents that were created using Acrobat DC. The Security settings of the document shows "No Security".

It sounds like a basic feature that one would expect to be able to do but I've tried everything I could do, with no success. This happens with pdf documents that I created with Acrobat DC, e.g. by printing a webpage using "Adobe PDF" as the selected printer. I've seen a number of other posts regarding this but none had a real solution.So it seems like a common and serious issue with Acrobat DC. Does anyone have a solution for this? Does anyone know how to bring this to the attention of Adobe if that is needed to resolve this.

This topic has been closed for replies.

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Rbcap,

I have Acrobat Pro on my 2015 5K iMac running Big Sur and I'm not having any issues selecting single words of text on PDFs that were created with Acrobat Pro.

I'm not saying you are not having the problem (obviously you are), but the problem MAY be specific to your system. It MAY be due to installation issues. It MAY be a screwup in Acrobat's preferences or your computer's preferences. It MAY also be somewhere else.

Can you help by providing more information on what you have so that various items can be ruled out?

R

RbcapAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you for your comments Gary.

I am using Windows 10 Business Version 20H2 and MS 365. Since you're not having the issue, I wonder if that could be because you are using a different operating system than I am. Also, are you using Acrobat Pro DC? If so, have you tried creating a PDF from a website page by printing the page using Adobe PDF as the printer? I'm just wondering if it could be a compatibility problem with Windows 10 and Acrobat Pro DC. In my case, a PDF is produced but I cannot select text. Tx

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Gary.

Thank you for your comments.

I tried to send you a "problem" pdf but I couldn't see the option to add a file. I'll try again.

Just to be sure we are referring to the same issue, I just want to reiterate what I'm trying to do... I want to create a pdf document of the actual website contents that I see on the screen. I have done this using Acrobat before I started using Acrobat DC.

When I'm on a website and try to create a pdf of it, I do not get the option to "save as" pdf, I can only select "print" and from that I can select "Adobe PDF" as the printer. This seems to work well and gets me a pdf of the page that's on my screen, but I'm unable to select text on the pdf document produce. Is this what your understanding is?

Thanks again for your help with this issue - much appreciated.

Hi Rbcap,

Actually I want to try something a bit different: since you are focusing on getting PDFs from web pages, let me direct you to some other (free) software that I find does the best job of generating web pages. It's called Print Friendly (go to printfriendly.com). You can install it into your browser (at least I could). What I particularly like about it is that if there are things that I do not want (e.g., ads, photos that take a whole page, comments at the end of an article, etc.) I can delete them before the PDF is generated. When you try this, you'll quickly see how it works.

Let me point out that different web sites are interpreted differently in all browsers, even PrintFriendly. So there are times when I'll use my Browser and print from there, I'll go into Acrobat and print a web page from "Create PDF…" or PrintFriendly. Each one may have a different take on how it interprets the web code. So on any page, YMMV.

Oh, and to send an image through the PM, you use this icon:

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