Acrobat won't copy text

[boofy_bloke]

When I try to copy the text of a pdf file, it pastes as gibberish in other programs - does anyone know how to fix this?

.#a ,#e /0123443

[Ponster]

A goggle search on ‘Acrobat won’t copy text’ hitting ‘I feel lucky’ gave me this…

It copies, but it’s complete junk.

Some ways of making a PDF file will give you hopelessly jumbled fonts. Think of it this way: most fonts have all of the letters a, b, c and so forth. You can put them in a grid; for most fonts, the letters will always appear in the same place. But some fonts have the letters all over the place. Acrobat has no way to know that this has been done, so it just copies the letters that you’d get for a normal font. This often happens when creating a PDF document in Windows, using TrueType fonts, and Acrobat Distiller. Before Distiller sees the fonts, they are already jumbled up. Sometimes just a few characters may be junk - these might be in a different font, or use a special character not available to other programs. Again, there isn’t much you can do.

[Iteki]

Online conversion tools at Adobe:

PDF features for Pro and Standard | Adobe Acrobat DC

They let you mail or upload a PDF and get text or html back.
In Adobe Reader you can use the button that looks like a T with a square to select text before copying and pasting. CTRL-a followed by CTRL-C usually works fine for me for what it is worth.

[Fear_Itself]

@Iteki

In Adobe Reader you can use the button that looks like a T with a square to select text before copying and pasting.

This can be disabled when the PDF document is created so that text cannot be copied and pasted.

Example: http://www.sia.com/research/pdf/equity_owners02.pdf