How to cut-paste from PDF with non-ASCII encoding?

pdf unicode acrobat
Steve picture Steve · Feb 4, 2012 · Viewed 31k times · Source

I have some PDFs and I am trying to cut and paste text they contain from Acrobat Reader into an HTML form. It seems that some of these files use (I suspect) unicode for text encoding, so when I try to paste into the HTML form (on firefox) I get the little boxes with hex chars in them rather than readable text. The problem is not that the PDF has not been OCRed -- when I try to do that in Acrobat Pro it says it can't because the file already contains renderable text. Is there any way to deal with this? For example could I add some sort of javascript to the form that would do conversion?

Answer

Bobrovsky picture Bobrovsky · Feb 4, 2012

Are you able to paste text copied from the file into other programs like Notepad or Word or any other?

Some PDF files are produced without special information that is crucial for successful extraction of text from them. Even by the Adobe tools. Basically, such files do not contain glyph-to-character mapping information.

Such files will be displayed and printed just fine, but text from them can't be properly copied / extracted.

For example, Distiller produces such files when "Smallest File Size" preset is used.

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