Copy paste from a pdf file?

alykhalil1

I am running windows 10. Is the any way too copy some text from pdf file & paste it elsewhere.? 

Thank u
AK

General_Grant

alykhalil1 said:

I am running windows 10. Is the any way too copy some text from pdf file & paste it elsewhere.? 

Thank u
AK

I would try double clicking at the beginning of the text, hold down while highlighting the remainder.  Then control+C.  Move to "elsewhere", then control+V.

Alderbank

Bear in mind that a pdf file is an image, a capture of the actual pixels as they print onto paper or a screen. It is not a text file, it's like a photograph of the printed page.

There are lots of OCR (optical character recognition) programs available, many of them free, which will convert  a pdf to a text file such as .txt or .docx which can then be read and edited by a word processor program such as MS Word.

Some are better than others. Most cope OK with individual letters although special letters in some languages can be a problem, but some struggle to get the formatting right (the way in which words and spaces are laid out on the page).

For a quick and reliable small job the free one from Adobe is good
https://www.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/online/pdf-to-word.html

General_Grant

Alderbank said:

Bear in mind that a pdf file is an image, a capture of the actual pixels as they print onto paper or a screen. It is not a text file, it's like a photograph of the printed page.

There are lots of OCR (optical character recognition) programs available, many of them free, which will convert  a pdf to a text file such as .txt or .docx which can then be read and edited by a word processor program such as MS Word.

Some are better than others. Most cope OK with individual letters although special letters in some languages can be a problem, but some struggle to get the formatting right (the way in which words and spaces are laid out on the page).

For a quick and reliable small job the free one from Adobe is good
https://www.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/online/pdf-to-word.html

Clicking and dragging works for me to highlight text to be copied and pasted.
The OP wanted to copy and paste "some text", not a complete document.

HillStreetBlues

Alderbank said:

Bear in mind that a pdf file is an image, a capture of the actual pixels as they print onto paper or a screen. It is not a text file, it's like a photograph of the printed page.

There are lots of OCR (optical character recognition) programs available, many of them free, which will convert  a pdf to a text file such as .txt or .docx which can then be read and edited by a word processor program such as MS Word.

Some are better than others. Most cope OK with individual letters although special letters in some languages can be a problem, but some struggle to get the formatting right (the way in which words and spaces are laid out on the page).

For a quick and reliable small job the free one from Adobe is good
https://www.adobe.com/uk/acrobat/online/pdf-to-word.html

PDF is Portable Document Format. It's a text based like Word, you can edit the text on a true PDF.
What you are describing is a "print" of a PDF  which is like an image.

So for OP it depend on which one it is how simply copying text is.

J_B

I use Foxit pdf reader and it has the facility to copy text.

HillStreetBlues

On a "true" PDF it's simple to edit, I decided I like the £1 million incentive.

facade

HillStreetBlues said:

On a "true" PDF it's simple to edit, I decided I like the £1 million incentive.

You can tell that is fake- "up to" should be in 3pt text!

DullGreyGuy

Alderbank said:

Bear in mind that a pdf file is an image, a capture of the actual pixels as they print onto paper or a screen. It is not a text file, it's like a photograph of the printed page.

I'm certainly not convinced you are correct @alderbank. It certainly can be the case that the document has been captured as an image but the majority of PDFs have selectable text, forms, shapes etc. 

Also bear in mind that the Apple's Word equivalent is Pages and its filetype is effectively a zip file containing a PDF and a JPG of the first page. Unsurprisingly if you open a saved file in Pages you can edit it in exactly the same way as a Word file and this goes back long before fast processors to run OCR over a 10,000 page document etc. 

Newcad

There are different types of PDF file, created in different ways and for different uses.
Somewhat confusingly most types are just saved as .pdf so there is no easy way to tell which type it is without looking at the files properties.

Whether you can copy/paste text from one depends on just which type of PDF it is, and to some extent what app/browser/software you are viewing it in.

flaneurs_lobster

Newcad said:

There are different types of PDF file, created in different ways and for different uses.
Somewhat confusingly most types are just saved as .pdf so there is no easy way to tell which type it is without looking at the files properties.

Whether you can copy/paste text from one depends on just which type of PDF it is, and to some extent what app/browser/software you are viewing it in.

Exactly this. 

It's possible to cut'n'paste text from a pdf (or any other "image") by using a viewer like Google Lens that will do the conversion in-flight. The updated versons of this using AI that are now available on new phones are almost seamless, treating images like any other source of data.