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Copying and pasting text in PDF turns to gibberish

quintonv31658388
New Here ,
Nov 25, 2018 Nov 25, 2018

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Using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC as my default printer.

 

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.

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correct answers 3 Correct answers

Adorobat Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee , Nov 26, 2018 Nov 26, 2018

Hi quintonv,

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 em

...

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mattf36860683
New Here , May 31, 2019 May 31, 2019

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 informatio

...

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Isa37131267pfkw
New Here , May 02, 2024 May 02, 2024

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!

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Isa37131267pfkw
New Here ,
May 02, 2024 May 02, 2024

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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!

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LegoAtlantis
New Here ,
Jul 16, 2024 Jul 16, 2024

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The way I fixed it was to export the file as a Word document (Foxit PDF did this on a free trial), then make it into a PDF from Word and the text could now be copied correctly. Shouldn't happen in the first place though.

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nicolas_4858
New Here ,
Sep 25, 2024 Sep 25, 2024

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I solved it by opening it in Microsoft Edge and printing it with Adobe PDF as the printer. Afterward, I opened the new PDF file, did OCR on Adobe Pro, and solved it.

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Vibrant_Moolight
New Here ,
Nov 14, 2024 Nov 14, 2024

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When I had this issue, it happen when my Adobe .pdf files loaded from a browser window, and it is only when I copied the text when the .pdf was in a browser that I received gibberish.  Once I downloaded the file and actually opened up adobe version 24.004.20243.0 and performed the same copy and paste, the selected text finally copied correctly.  

 

Was everyone else having this issue from the browser, or from the actual app?

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