Strange behaviour - cut & paste

Report · May 03, 2016

I downloaded a court document... When I copy and paste a telephone number from it, on my screen it reads as one number, but when I copy/paste it pastes a number that is slightly different.

Any ideas what would cause this?

I'd like to know if the document was altered - which it must have been, but how would it remember what the original number was? And furthermore, how can I prove it was altered?

Report · May 03, 2016

Which version of Acrobat? And where are you pasting it to? From which application was it produced?

In File > Properties, you will see the creation and modified dates as well as the application. This may or may not help you find out if it was altered.

When text is deleted and retyped in an application, it is impossible to know what the original text was. WordPerfect used to store the changes, but I don't know of any other software that does. Acrobat does not.

If you go to Edit PDF > Edit in Acrobat DC, you can see the font used. This is from Acrobat DC.

If it was scanned and OCRd, you may or may not have trouble with the copy and paste. Newer versions of Acrobat do it better, and there are choices to make when doing OCR that affect the outcome.