Copy paste from pdf without the formatting

[jt77474]

I've never understood how to copy and paste from pdf to word without getting the line return characters which mess up the formatting. Why doesn't text flow from line to line as it does in a normal word processor? Why does adobe insist on copying the newline character when you paste from pdf to another application?

This must be the dumbest feature in the world.

If there's a way to copy and paste from a pdf in plain text, without line breaks, please please tell me how. Thanks

[Guest]

I don't know a way to do it right out of Adobe, but you can use this tool to do what you're asking:  http://www.textfixer.com/tools/remove-line-breaks.php.  I routinely have to copy and paste pdf material for the web for a non-profit I work for, and I use that tool every time because it works so well.  Plus it's free.  If you find out how to do it without using a third-party tool let me know!

[cmonty5000]

You are my new hero.  This worked like a charm.  Thanks!

[drkurl]

or you can run this application in the background, you can also exit if you want. It's amazing, I never had any safety issues.

Fix Copy-and-Pasting in PDFs - Blog - One Hour Programming - Programming for the Rest of Us

[Md. Tahsinul22467454y3kr]

u are the real champ...really i mean it..thanks a lot for this background app....

[Vishalcross]

Bless you brother, that is an excellent solution

[Matej24459327689a]

And it still works in 2022 on windows 10, thank you!

[yshiddi]

I hope you have eternal happiness!

[davidbean]

OMG - this is amazing - thank you thank you. they NEED to build this into InDesign!

[gimmilow]

Its an old question but I found another way. in Adobe Acrobat you can go to

File/Save as/ Word or Excel Online

At least it filters out the breaks and you can smoothly copy past. Manual line breaks cannot be filtered out but it saves a lot of  time. Especially if you have to copy to html. When you copy the text out it keeps even the ul and li tags so it is ready to go online wihtout extra making bullet point afterwords.

Textfixer is also ok but then you have to make bullet point manually. If you copy text out of a pdf with bulletpoints its not well formated for import into html and you have to make the bulltet points afterwords again. So try first my first descriped method with exporting to Word.

We first lost a lot of time with the Textfixer Method. However, make it better

Keep up

[~graffiti]

gimmilow  wrote

Its an old question but I found another way. in Adobe Acrobat you can go to

File/Save as/ Word or Excel Online

That requires a subscription to the PDFPack...

[SDB-NashvilleJason]

Great solution brother!!! Works for me. Lots of blogs that come from PDF and I have been backspacing and deleting line breaks forever. Thank you thank you!

[mydogboogie]

There's an easier way -

Right click on the selected text in acrobat, select copy with formatting. When you paste into word, it will paste the text without all the annoying paragraph breaks in every line.

I'm not sure if this also works in Adobe Reader or not.

[Captain America]

This is genius. Much more elegant than find and replacing. Now I simply copy with formatting, then paste without formatting in my target app, and it works like a charm.

[hughesbl]

Ten years later & it's still stupid. I know there are workarounds, but... really?

[try67]

Paste the text into a plain-text editor and use search & replace to remove line-breaks.

When you copy text it copies what is there. If there's a line-break, it will copy that, too. The issue is with applications that add line-breaks when creating PDF files in the first place, which is not necessary (and doesn't do anything, anyway).

[AlphaAtom]

A workaround that I discovered is to open the PDF using a web-browser - Chromium or Edge work for me - and then copy the text and paste it into Word. 

[Markcq]

I usually use TextSoap, but even then it can be painful, especially if it's a very long docuemnt.

Here is a little longer way around it. I just did it now with a 100 page document that I have to typeset. The client only had a PDF version of it and no open files 👹

1. Open original PDF. First check to see if it is a "Tagged" PDF.
2. Go Control D or Command D, look at Description Tab, look at "Tagged PDF" at bottom left. It will be yes or no, and worth noting.
3. Next. If it has headers, footers or page numbers, you need to get rid of these.
4. Use Crop tool in Acrobat to crop all pages to same size, removing unnecessary details.
5. File > Save as > More Options > Post Script > close the PDF.
6. Click on the new Post Script file and should automatically open in Acrobat Distiller, which will automatically after a few seconds, re-save the Post Script as a new PDF. Once that's complete, close Distiller.
7. Open new PDF file and give it a new name so you don't confuse it with any others.
8. Now if your original PDF was not a "Tagged PDF", then you need to Tag it now. If it was Tagged, then ignore this Number 9, and go straight to number 10.
9. Go Tools > Accessibility > AutoTag Document. Just ignore any Tagging reports that may show up in the left-hand pane.
10. Save under name if you wish. The important thing is this file MUST be closed and re-opened again after Tags are inserted.
11. Now comes the best bit. Select all text (Control A / Command A), and Paste into your InDesign file, flowing all text as it comes in. Use InDesign's Autoflow to add pages automatically to the end of the Story.

[Matej24459327689a]

Someone mentioned this application in a subthread back in 2015. I don't know much about security but I took the risk and downloaded it. When you start it, it doesn't seem to be doing anything but then you copy and paste from pdf into any other program and it does all the job for you, as though this issue has never even existed! http://www.onehourprogramming.com/blog/2010/9/1/fix-copy-and-pasting-in-pdfs.html 

[Mohanad240795760sha]

Hello from the future (i.e., 13 years later)...

Now we eveloved that we can ask ChatGPT "remove extra line breaks from the following text" -> PASTE text from adobe PDF.

Well... Thanks Adobe for managing to ignore the issue this long. I wonder how many years later this issue will presist.

[Abambo]

Adobe can't be blamed for this. When there is a line break in the text, “copy” needs to take it, as that is what has been asked for.

[LuluDemon]

You can pretty easily set up a macro in word to sort it out somewhat easily, especially if its just a few lines. It will save you a lot of time if you are doing it often - and you can also use the line break remover linked above if you feel like it for longer sections.

1. Paste the text from PDF into your word document and place your cursor anywhere on the last line of the copied text
2. go to the developer tab in word (you may need to enable this in ribbon settings).
3. Click on record macro and assign a key kombo (I use ctrl+ . )
4. press control and left arrow (command on mac) (this gets your cursor to the beginning of the row), then press backspace. 
5. Stop the macro
6. now every time you paste a block of text from pdf into your word document, all you need to do to remove the line breaks is put your typing cursor on the last line and repeatedly use your macro to remove all line breaks. 

[Abambo · Accepted solution]

You can use find replace in Word to remove the line breaks and replace them by a space.