When trying to copy and paste text from pdf to another app, the text appears as gibberish (symbols, etc.)
Some pdf prints also do not allow for copying/highlighting of lines of text - tried "Enhance Scan" to ensure OCR and flow but still cannot select single words or lines of text in some documents.
As mentioned, you are getting gibberish text when copying and pasting text from pdf, it seems the issue seems to be the font related.
If the fonts of PDF don't have Unicode tables and do not use standard encoding for mapping the glyph indices to characters then you get garbage characters during copy/paste.
Also, there is a possibility the fonts used to create the PDF file are not available on your system.
you may try using the PDF Fixup Profile "Embed Fonts" in the Preflight tool to embed the font and check if that helps. However, the font does need to be installed on your system.
You may also refer to the following forum threads discussing the similar issue:
Try right clicking the text and "copy with formatting".
I have been trying to OCR Japanese documents and copy/pasting doesn't work, exporting as Word doesn't work. However, right clicking and "copy with formatting" *does* work, but apparently only for very small sections of text.
Not sure if it will work with other documents, but give it a try and see how you go.
This seems to be an ongoing and unfixed issue in Acrobat. All the various "solutions" refer to the lack or corruption of font information, but if the scanned document was OCRed in Acrobat, then surely that is an Acrobat problem, not a "font issue"
Hi guys, I just found a solution and thought it might help someone.
Basically you can just open the google translate app on your phone, and use the image translation function (camera) to scan the file. Note that you'll need to set both the detected and result languages same as the file language, otherwise it'll translate into another language. When the process completes, select 'copy text', and then you can copy the text. You're welcome!
As mentioned, you are getting gibberish text when copying and pasting text from pdf, it seems the issue seems to be the font related.
If the fonts of PDF don't have Unicode tables and do not use standard encoding for mapping the glyph indices to characters then you get garbage characters during copy/paste.
Also, there is a possibility the fonts used to create the PDF file are not available on your system.
you may try using the PDF Fixup Profile "Embed Fonts" in the Preflight tool to embed the font and check if that helps. However, the font does need to be installed on your system.
You may also refer to the following forum threads discussing the similar issue:
very last version of Acrobat DC is not copying entire font - missing characters - afres pasting it do INDD there is missing characters.
this never happned to me in the older versions!
the print pdf was created on MY computer, with all fonts embeded, no I need to make some corrections and it’s not possible anymore without this terrible issue.
Acroobat DC has serious problem to copy and paste fonts from pdf!
Try right clicking the text and "copy with formatting".
I have been trying to OCR Japanese documents and copy/pasting doesn't work, exporting as Word doesn't work. However, right clicking and "copy with formatting" *does* work, but apparently only for very small sections of text.
Not sure if it will work with other documents, but give it a try and see how you go.
This seems to be an ongoing and unfixed issue in Acrobat. All the various "solutions" refer to the lack or corruption of font information, but if the scanned document was OCRed in Acrobat, then surely that is an Acrobat problem, not a "font issue"
Found another solution for Pro DC as of Nov 2020 version 2020.013.20064 (non of those other solutions worked for me): print to pdf>save file>open new doc>select edit function>copy/paste.
Is this an issue with a particular PDF file or with all the PDFs? Please try with a different PDF file and check. If the file is stored on a shared network/drive please download it to your computer locally and then try again.
What is the workflow/steps you are doing? A small video recording of the same would be very helpful.
What is the version of the Acrobat DC you are using? To check the version go to Help > About Acrobat and make sure you have the recent version 23.01.20143 installed. Go to Help > Check for updates and reboot the computer once.
Also try to repair the installation from the help menu (Win Only) and see if that works.
You may also try to create a new test user profile with full admin rights in Win or enable the root account in MAC and try using the application there and check.
Adobe DC used to be able to handle "unicode" text, but unfortunately, Adobe (in their infinite wisdom) has elected to add a "randomisation algorithm". Now, when unicode text is imported, Adobe DC changes that to a randomly selected font.
The only workaround is to uninstall ALL fonts, except for the ones you want to use.
Same problem - scan in text to a Searchable PDF and the Greek words display correctly in the Acrobat reader. But if I try to copy a section of the text to paste into another document (typically Word), the roman characters are fine, but the Greek text is gibberish. Is there not a simple solution such as enabling Greek text or a particular font in Reader?
I had that same issue this morning with some font in a large PDF that I needed to find some specifiec terms. I simply printed as PDF and ran a new text recognition scan on top, then saved and it worked like a charm.
hopefully this will help someone else in the same situation.
I am on Mac and I have the same issue. I created a large file under CorelDraw. When I try to copy from the PDf to Word, it works. But when my colleagues open on their Windows computers, it does the gibberish once pasted in Word.
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