# adobe cut and paste

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-cut-and-paste/379367>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 6, 2006, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-cut-and-paste/379367 "2006-11-06T23:13:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![dauerbach](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c2a13f/32.png) [@dauerbach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dauerbach)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2006, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-cut-and-paste/379367/1 "2006-11-06T23:13:15Z")

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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?

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**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2006, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-cut-and-paste/379367/2 "2006-11-06T23:18:40Z")

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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.

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**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\
**Post date:** [November 6, 2006, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-cut-and-paste/379367/3 "2006-11-06T23:24:48Z")

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Kids today. Back in my day you actually had to copy stuff word for word the long way…with a pen.

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**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\
**Post date:** [November 7, 2006, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-cut-and-paste/379367/4 "2006-11-07T00:51:39Z")

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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.

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**Author:** ![Stan\_Doubt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/53a042/32.png) [@Stan\_Doubt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stan_Doubt)\
**Post date:** [November 7, 2006, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-cut-and-paste/379367/5 "2006-11-07T01:42:07Z")

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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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition) software to extract the text from the image.