How to enable copying of text when exporting to Interactive pdf

[Sherwood Forest]

Hello all,

I would appreciate it if you could help me out with this one: I want to be able to copy/ paste text from the document that I have created in InDesign after I export it into pdf. How can I do that?

Thank you!

[BobLevine · Accepted solution]

Are you saying you can’t select text in a PDF? That’s not an InDesign issue.

[davidblatner]

I'm going to politely disagree with Bob here… (hi Bob!) 🙂

There IS an InDesign issue… when you export an InDesign file and you know you're going to want to copy text out of the PDF, then you absolutely want to turn on "Create Tagged PDF" in the export PDF options dialog box. If it is disabled, then copying text from the PDF is a total pain. You can do it, but every line is usually broken into a separate paragraph, etc.

When Create Tagged PDF is enabled, then the PDF "knows" where the paragraph breaks are, streams of text, and more.

[BobLevine]

Hi David!

I may have misread the post as being completely unable to copy the text, but yes, you’re right if the issue is broken paragraphs.