I am trying to do a paper and cannot cut and paste from an adobe acrobat article. It would certainly be easier if I could. Is there any way to do this?
What software do you have?
Adobe Reader allows copy and paste text, provided you choose the “select text” tool. However, the results are often less than satisfactory, given the block layout nature of a lot of PDFs.
Kids today. Back in my day you actually had to copy stuff word for word the long way…with a pen.
If the PDF is a scanned document, you can’t use the select text tool, and I think it’s possible for the document creator to disable the tool, even if it’s a conventional PDF document.
To elaborate a bit on Dewey Finn’s explanation, not all text elements in a PDF file may be actual text, they can just as easily be images. An entire document of text can be simply an image of a page of text. It does not necessarily have to come from a scanned document, but that is the context in which “unselectable text” is usually encountered.
As a last resort, you can always take a screenshot and use OCR software to extract the text from the image.