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Can't Copy Text From PDF
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l008com
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May 16, 2011, 01:41 AM
 
I have this PDF that doesn't let me select text. It's just a restaurant menu, and I need to copy all of it bit by bit. But both Preview and Acrobat don't let me select the text. It is actual text too, and not an image of text. Is there any trick for bypassing the copy-text-block in PDFs? I tried printing it to a PDF but that didn't work.
     
l008com  (op)
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May 16, 2011, 01:44 AM
 
I take it back. The text isn't real text. It's not an image of text either. Well, it's not a JPG of text, it looks like they outlined the text in illustrator before saving it. So it's just one complicated fully vector image. Kinda dumb, but oh well. I enjoy hassles.
     
MacNNUK
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May 16, 2011, 02:42 AM
 
Why not ask the restaurant for a download text copy, as a potential customer ?

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l008com  (op)
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May 16, 2011, 02:44 AM
 
And then I could spend the next 4 hours emailing back and forth, trying to explain the difference between raster image, vector image, and text, in pdf documents. I'll just do it the hard way, I'm almost done already.
     
Cold Warrior
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May 16, 2011, 08:19 AM
 
Google Docs can do ok OCR sometimes. Upload the pdf there and see if it'll work some magic.
     
hab
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May 16, 2011, 02:55 PM
 
A possible work around: Print it out. Scan it. Then OCR it. (???)
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Thorzdad
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May 16, 2011, 03:21 PM
 
If you know anyone with Acrobat Pro, give it to them to OCR. It actually does a great job. Heck, email it to me and I'll do it.
     
l008com  (op)
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May 16, 2011, 03:27 PM
 
It's too late, the document is done. But I didn't know acrobat did OCR. I have CS5 suite, I guess I should install acrobat pro with it. I usually skip acrobat since I never use it and its extremely annoying when a file "accidentally" opens in acrobat instead of preview. Oh well, thanks for the tips.
     
ghporter
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May 16, 2011, 10:24 PM
 
Originally Posted by l008com View Post
It's too late, the document is done. But I didn't know acrobat did OCR. I have CS5 suite, I guess I should install acrobat pro with it. I usually skip acrobat since I never use it and its extremely annoying when a file "accidentally" opens in acrobat instead of preview. Oh well, thanks for the tips.
Acrobat PRO, not Reader, does a lot of things, including OCR. It's part of the mechanisms that let you use the creator functions to produce PDFs that have all the text available.

On the other hand, a lot of desktop scanners come with very useful OCR software; my Canon MX310 did, (just the light version)' and it's surprisingly good, accepting scans or image files.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
   
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