Last year I had to do some translation work on a pdf document.
Since some of the information, like company name, address, phone number etc. remained the same in the translation, I copied the original pdf text, pasted it into word and then translated the word document where required.
I just tried to copy/paste the text from the pdf document now, but it doesn't work.
I go into the pdf document, select the text tool. highlight the text I need, copy it...that all seems to work, but when I then paste into MS word nothing happens.
I'm pretty sure I used that same basic method last year and it worked fine.
krs: sounds like the PDF has become copy protected to me. Is it exactly the same document you copied from before or a copy of that document. I've PMed you. Send the document here if you want to. I have a utility to unlock locked PDFs.
krs: sounds like the PDF has become copy protected to me. Is it exactly the same document you copied from before or a copy of that document. I've PMed you. Send the document here if you want to. I have a utility to unlock locked PDFs.
The document is the annual summary of a commercial European toy fair.
This year's document is based on the format from last year, but with changed text of course.
I'll email the publisher and have him send me a word version of it (I'll also ask if he locked it by mistake). I was just surprised that I couldn't do a straight copy and paste of the text like I did last year.
krs: people have gone password protection crazy, routinely locking pdfs to prevent copying text. I;m sure that's what happened in your case. I recently received a PRESS RELEASE that was copy protected--does this make sense? I eventually sprung for a PDF unlocking utility since this was happening to me a few times per week,
Another alternative when you encounter a problem like this is to OCR it. My OCR software (ReadIris 11) even preserves formatting.
I could use good OCR software for another 'freebie' project I'm doing.
Do you have any idea how well Readiris 11 handles foreign languages that still use the western alphabet but with a few unique characters - like French, Spanish and German?
krs: people have gone password protection crazy, routinely locking pdfs to prevent copying text. I;m sure that's what happened in your case. I recently received a PRESS RELEASE that was copy protected--does this make sense? I eventually sprung for a PDF unlocking utility since this was happening to me a few times per week,
I emailed the publisher of the pdf document last night and he sent me an rtf version of the text this morning. So I should be all set for this projects, but I'm still trying to figure out why I can't copy the pdf text to word like I did last year.
The publisher tells me nothing was locked or password protected in the pdf document.
I think it can depend on whether the text is an image or not. I'm no expert on the pdf format, but it seems to me that some you can copy text from, while others, where the content is basically an image, you can only do the equivalent of a screen capture.
I could be way out to lunch, but that has been my experience.
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