I have a pdf, from a paid members group. I'm using Preview and I highlighted a few lines. When I pasted it, I got the whole page, looks like a jpg, not getting the plain text portion I hoped for.
Is this common? Can I not copy and paste text from Preview? Do I need a different pdf viewer to do so?
MacBook Air
The PDF, or part of it may have been scanned, and that part of it will be an image, not the selectable text that you expected. If that is the case, then you will need optical character recognition (OCR) software to extract the text from the image.
The PDF, or part of it may have been scanned, and that part of it will be an image, not the selectable text that you expected. If that is the case, then you will need optical character recognition (OCR) software to extract the text from the image.
This depends on the PDF and what software authored the PDF and what type of restrictions/security is applied. Simply some allow for it, some don't
Of course you can try alternatives— a true PDF editor will have more functionality.
There are many, a few examples:
Adobe Acrobat Reader
PDFpen
pdfExpert
It sounds like what Viking OS X said may be the case. If that is the case and you are seeing a picture of the text, then when you copy, you will get all of that picture. One way to confirm this is to attempt to open the file with Microsoft Word and, if possible, copy the text from there. Word will often open a HPG. You do this by having Word open and then using the Open command in Word and then selecting the file to be opened. Good luck.
Give the free trial version ofd Skim a try. It's designed for annotating technical PDFs. There is no apparent time limit on the demo version.
best pdf viewer to copy and paste text
