Preview Copy/Paste Help

[iLindzo]

Hi all!

I'm having an issue with copying and pasting text from a PDF file.

Here's the deal.. In Preview, I use the Text Selection tool and most of the time, it works fine. I can copy and paste the text where ever I need it. On a select few, however, I can select the text, do a Cmd-C, and when I go to paste, it will either paste blocks which cannot be changed with just a font change, or it will paste just the spaces... no other characters.

I've tried opening the PDFs in Adobe Reader as well, and copying from there, but no luck.

Any ideas on a fix?

Thanks!

 

[technologist]

Some PDFs are deliberately locked to prevent copying text. There's no easy way around this. Buying Acrobat Professional may or may not allow you to break this restriction.

Obviously, copying from copyrighted documents is not legal, except in limited cases for scholarly or commentary purposes.

 

[iLindzo]

No worries.. It's not from copyrighted material. It's for work.. I need to copy and paste resumes.

 

[MacHeadCase]

Ok this is a long shot but... Are you running Leopard?

If the .pdf was created with Acrobat 8, could it have carried over a problem? I ask because it is a well-known fact that Acrobat 8 has compatibility issues with Leopard and maybe Preview can't handle it in the normal fashion?

Anyway it might be a very farfetched theory.

 

[iLindzo]

Sadly.. I am not running Leopard here. I haven't upgraded because of compatibility issues with Internal Apps.

 

[MacHeadCase]

How was the .pdf saved? Was there a software update somehow? Something changed between when you could copy/paste and when you couldn't anymore with this file.

 

[iLindzo]

I could never do the Copy and Paste and have it work.

I am able to use the selection tool, and it looks as though it's working, but turns out that it's not selecting any of the characters as they're shown.

 

[MacHeadCase]

Ok let me rephrase that then.

How was the .pdf saved? Was there a software update somehow? Something changed between when you could use the selection tool and when you couldn't anymore with this file.

 

[iLindzo]

I received the PDF in an email, and just dragged it to the desktop. No software updates that I can think of. It's something having to do with the way it was saved by the candidate because it doesn't work on any of the computers at work.

I've tried re-saving it, but this does nothing either. It's a mystery!!

 

[MacHeadCase]

Ok so the file was maybe partially corrupted or it was the way it was saved.

Do you have Acrobat Professional? Maybe you could open the file in there and resave the file under another name, see if the new save wouldn't fix it?

Or better yet if you had Acrobat Distiller, you could go in an application and save the file as a postscript file, then make a brand new .pdf file from it.

If you have Distiller, you can save a file as a postscript file in just about any application in OS X Tiger (it is definitely different in Panther and I haven't tested this is Leopard so dunno if it is different from Tiger or not). Photoshop, Quark, etc. The way it works usually is you go to the print dialog box and click on Print (or Command + P).

I have two screenies: one with the dialog box in Photoshop and one in Preview. (Note: the correct extension to a postscript file is .ps)


If you don't have Distiller, I don't think you'll be able to do much with a postscript file though...