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Shannon28088733kbaa
New Participant
January 24, 2023
Question

Copy and Paste Issues from PDF. Putting in Edit mode before copying fixes it. Why?

  • January 24, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 2170 views

My job entails receiving pdf reports from vendors and copying and pasting certain text paragraphs from the report into our system. For the past year or so, the formatting is not preserved when we copy into our system and there are lots of space and line breaks when the paragraph gets pasted. We somehow figured out that if we put the pdf if edit mode and then copy the text it pastes perfectly into our system. Can anyone explain what happens when the pdf goes into edit mode that would preserve the formatting? I would like to figure out how to have our vendors send these reports over so that we don't have to go into edit mode before copying. TIA

 

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1 reply

Document Geek
Document Geek
Community Expert
January 24, 2023

I don't know the technical explanation of what is happening behind the scenes, but I do know that oftentimes, when I'm having copy and paste issues (like the extra line breaks you describe), if I use a different PDF reader (specificallyApple Preview), the text copies properly, without the extra spaces and lines breaks.

 

There must be something that happens under the hood when you Edit the PDF, that tells Acrobat to remove all the extraneous line breaks. Aple Preview does that automatically.

 

Maybe there is an alternative PDF reader that you can use for this purpose. I honestly think that may be easier than trying to have the vendors prepare the PDFs differently.

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Shannon28088733kbaaAuthor
New Participant
January 24, 2023
Thank you! I did some digging and it seems the only PDF reader option
through the company computer is Adobe (we are blocked from downloading new
programs). I did try it through my phone though and used XODO Pdf reader
since I already had that downloaded and it worked! Thank you for the idea.
I do have one other thought that I have experimented with a little. I have
verified that all of our vendors create their reports in Word and then
convert to PDF. From the couple of experiments, I have tried, Saving as a
PDF and Printing as a PDF are actually different, and my tests with Saving
as a PDF seem to preserve the formatting where as I think Printing as a PDF
optimizes the document for actual printing and screws up the formatting.


Shannon Reiswig, CIFI / Investigator
7501 E. Lowry Blvd. / Denver, CO 80230
phone 303.361.4809 / pinnacol.com

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