Copying from a pdf file in Greek

[HeddevH]

I have a word list for school, and in it are different words in Greek and their translations. I'm trying to copy the Greek words (or basically the entire file) so I can paste it in an easier learning environment (e.g. Memrise). However, every time I try to copy these words, the letters are changed to their Roman counterparts.

For example, "εχω" becomes "e[cw". I am copying a text that contains both Roman and Greek characters, but if I only copy a single Greek word this also happens. I can copy texts from the internet just fine, so it most probably has something to do with the reader.

I'm using Adobe Acrobat. Does anyone have any idea why this happens, and how I could prevent it?

Thank you for reading and any effort.

[Test Screen Name · Accepted solution]

The file will be using a special font that has Greek letters in the place of Roman ones - very old fashioned, because fonts now should use Unicode. Probably no way to fix it but if you can get hold of the font (it might still be for sale) you could apply it in Word with the same results.

[HeddevH]

That seems to be the issue, playing around with the fonts in Word does turn the text into Greek text again. Too bad that also means I can't copy them as Greek symbols into a blank text file. Thanks for your answer, at least now I know I won't be missing a much easier solution.

[Abe Ster]

I found a solution for this, though it's a bit chunky I guess better than nothing. 

1- Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat
2- Save it as TIFF. If it has lots of pages, better save them in a folder because each page will be saved as single image.
3- Create a new PDF in Adobe Acrobat from multiple files. Select all the TIFF images and combine. Save as PDF.
4- Open the new PDF. Go into Edit PDF mode. If you see a notification about language automatically recognized as Greek, that's it. Now you can select and copy the Greek words, they'll be pasted right. However, you gotta keep the Edit PDF mode open, cause somehow it only works like this.

Hope it helps.

[Bernd Alheit]

This will not work with Acrobat Reader.

[Abe Ster]

It worked for me, I'm able to copy the Greek words as original now. 

The logic is converting text to image (to get rid of the problem with unicode). Then converting the image back to text (using OCR in Acrobat). You can probably try the same process with different apps.