Please explain

[P.M.B]

Hi Gang,

When I copy text and print to PDF, occasionally the PDF has seemingly random formatting issues.

For example:  I print some text (formatted with HTML I believe) from a webpage to PDF.

Then, when I copy/paste text from that PDF anywhere else I get random errors

like the word 'functions' copies over as 'Junctions'.  That's the most recent example.

If I copy the text directly from the source (the text I printed to PDF) it's fine & pastes accurately.

It seems to my layman's brain that something is going wring during the conversion to PDF.

Does anyone have an explanation about this or is it just part of the beauty that is

Adobe's current line-up of profession softwares?  Forgive my cynicism, I'm an After Effects user.

Thanks,

Paul

[Bernd Alheit]

How did you create the PDF file? Acrobat Reader can't create PDF files.

[P.M.B]

Hi,

Thanks.  I'm using Acrobat DC.  I'm just highlighting the text on the webpage and the CTRL-P(rint) to PDF.

[Test Screen Name]

1. What is the name of the print driver you select?

2. What is the browser?

3. What is the URL (address) of the problem web page, so we can try it if we want?

[P.M.B]

Hi,

I'm using chrome.

I can't i know for sure what driver i am using.  When I hit Ctrl-P or choose print from the right-click context menu there is an option for Adobe PDF with a little printer icon.

Unfortunately I cannot give access to the website as it is a secure work server & password protected.

The material in question is also intellectually "sensitive" & copyrighted.

All I can say is that the text on the page is HTML encoded with bold and italics and dividers and such.  Everything appears fine in the PDF but when I copy paste it pastes 'wrong'.  Sometimes it's character spacing or sometimes it's different characters entirely.

One othe rthing is that if I copy paste directly from the webpage to a notepad document everything is fine. I can copy paste from the notepad document no problem.  However if I copy/paste from the webpage to a Word Pad (rich text) document I have the same problem as with the PDF.

Please let me know what other information I can provide other than the text itself (which I legally cannot share) or access to the page.

Thanks.

[Test Screen Name]

The printer driver name is shown above the Change button. But to be sure you can click Change and reselect Adobe PDF.

The point of this test is to make sure it is using the Adobe print driver instead of another less good one like Microsoft's Windows 10 PDF printer.

But your result is very interesting, about copy/paste in rich text from the web page. It's hard to think why this would fail, while copy of plain text succeeds. But I am sure it is connected to the PDF problem.

Some suggestions to try

1. Try a different font.

2. Try to make a very very simple HTML demonstration by removing everything else etc. The chances are you won't be able to do this, and the problem will go away. But if you still have the problem, you can probably change a few things and be left with a shareable fragment of HTML.