How to copy text from PDF? Sometimes you want to copy and use sentences and pictures from a PDF displayed on your computer or smartphone screen , for which it is easy to use the PDF viewer’s copy text feature. However, copyrighted PDFs and PDFs created from images cannot be copied, so another solution is required. This article will share with you various ways to copy text from PDF.
In addition to PDF viewers for viewing PDFs, modern browsers can directly open PDFs distributed on the Web. You can then specify and copy the text range from the screen displayed in the browser.
Typically, to copy and paste from a PDF, you highlight, right-click, and copy as you normally would, as with any digital document. However, there are two instances when this may not be feasible; when you are dealing with a scanned PDF or a secured pdf – protected from editing. Rather than opting to purchase a software purely to unlock the protection or an expensive OCR solution, you can simply use ours, to freely extract text from your PDF.
Table of Contents
For example, the Chrome browser will:
(1) Use the mouse to select the range to be copied on the displayed PDF page.
(2) Click the right mouse button to display the menu and select the “Copy” command, or press Ctrl + C while specifying the range to be copied to copy the selected text range.
(3) Next, display the editing screen of the text editing software and paste it.
When pasting, there is a newline at the end of each line in the copied source PDF. Whether to insert a newline at the end of a line depends on the browser or PDF viewer.
As stated above, by converting the PDF document to another format, you will copy and paste all the text, as well as other content types, i.e., images and tables, into an editable text document. Choose Word, PPT, or Excel, depending on your needs, as well as the original format of the PDF document. Once you have done this, you can select the text as you would with any ordinary file.
induction:
| Insert a newline character for each line |
| Microsoft Edge (83.0.478.58) (based on Chromium open source) |
| Adobe Acrobat Reader (Adobe Reader) (2020.009.20067) |
| Google Chrome (83.0.4103.116) |
| online pdf editor (AbcdPDF.com web online tool) |
| No line breaks (connecting lines) per line
Firefox (78.0.1) |
PDF cannot copy text – the most common reason is PDF protection
Copying the text displayed on the screen in PDF format is easy. However, there are occasional situations where it cannot be replicated and cannot be replicated.
For example, when you select a text range in Adobe Reader and open the Edit menu, the copy command might not be enabled .
In this case, check the PDF properties first. In Adobe Reader, use the Properties command on the File menu to display the document properties dialog with the Security tab selected.
The Document Restrictions Summary section of the Security tab displays the status of PDF usage restrictions (protection) set by the PDF file author. If “Copy Content” is set to “Don’t Allow”, you will not be able to copy text, images, etc.
In order to use the text on such PDFs, you must obtain a password from the PDF author and release the protection. If this is not possible, you must print the PDF or convert it to an image, then use OCR software to recognize the characters and convert them to text.
Other workarounds:
| For copy after conversion via online service |
| convert pdf to word (AbcdPDF.com web online tool) |
If you have multiple PDF files, you can use merge pdf to merge them, and then use the online pdf editor or convert pdf to word.
Do you discard my files?
Yes, yes, and yes. We process just north of a million documents every single day. Our popularity has grown thanks to the various security measures we have deployed to maintain a safe infrastructure for our user base. Secure, military-grade SSL encryption will protect your documents from file uploads, transfers, and downloads. We also discard files after one hour of processing. You can convert as many files as you’d like, back and forth between their file formats.
Also, if you decide to open the PDF with our offline tool, the options of file transfers will be directly embedded into the PDF reader, all for your convenience. For the PDF to Word, PPT, and Excel tools – no document will be uploaded, as Smallpdf Desktop process files locally. It can’t get any more secure than that! get desktop app
Summarize
How to copy text from PDF? The above document provides you with various solutions, with which you can try them step by step.
There are many reasons why PDF text cannot be selected and copied , such as when scanned images of printed documents are converted to PDF, or when characters in the PDF are not considered text , these PDFs will also be converted to text using OCR software.
If you wish to turn the original PDF document into a PDF file that one can copy and paste text, all you have to do is convert the file to PDF format. This process can be done via the very same PDF converter, or you can click ‘Save As’ from the Microsoft Office file.
Several potential reasons prevent users from copying text from a PDF document onto other platforms. One of the major concerns involving this is the pre-settings of the PDF document. If the document is read-only, it is nearly impossible to copy and paste content from a PDF document. With users unable to make any changes in the document, they cannot select the text written within it.
Protecting the document is equivalent to understanding that the author or distributor of the PDF document has not allowed you to duplicate the document.
If your PDF file is scanned, the content will not be actual text. You won’t be able to copy from the PDF directly.
After launching PDFelement, drag and drop your scanned or image-based PDF file into the program window or click “Open PDF” to open it.