- COPY AND PASTE TEXT FROM A PDF PDF
- COPY AND PASTE TEXT FROM A PDF PRO
- COPY AND PASTE TEXT FROM A PDF DOWNLOAD
So, occasionally you’ll have some stubborn text that still breaks weirdly when pasted into InDesign, even though you copied it from a tagged PDF. Creating accurate, 100% screen-reader-friendly tagged PDFs takes a lot more work than the automatic methods. But using these commands is similar to converting a Microsoft Word document to HTML with Word’s own Save As HTML command - it gets you there, but it’s ugly.
COPY AND PASTE TEXT FROM A PDF PDF
In my experience, using InDesign’s Create Tagged PDF or Acrobat’s Add Tags to Document commands do a “good enough” job, most of the time, to get rid of the end-of-line hard returns in text copied from the PDF. (Unfortunately, a side effect is that the copied text loses all paragraph returns, even the ones that should be there.) But that didn’t matter to me since I was just grabbing small chunks of text, and adding an occasional Return/Enter is easy. As soon as it’s done you can select text, copy it, and paste it into InDesign as one single paragraph. You’ll see a little progress bar appear letting you know it’s doing its thing, it doesn’t take too long at all.
COPY AND PASTE TEXT FROM A PDF PRO
In Acrobat Pro 8, choose Advanced > Accessibility > Add Tags to Document: Luckily, you can add basic tagging to a PDF right in Acrobat Pro (not sure about Standard). Since tagging adds only a tiny amount of overhead to the PDF file size, and it has such huge benefits (not just for accessibilty, or to make it easier to extract text with Acrobat’s Select tool, but also for search engine indexing) I don’t understand why most of the presets have it disabled. For all the other presets you’ll need to turn it on manually. Only the High Quality Print preset has Create Tagged PDF enabled.
I double-checked the PDF Export presets in InDesign CS3. I thought it was interesting that the PDF was exported from InDesign CS2 (note the info for Application and PDF Producer) but yet it wasn’t tagged, even though all it takes is a click on the Create Tagged PDF checkbox in InDesign’s PDF Export Options: You can see that in the last line of this partial screen shot from the first panel (“Description”) of the dialog box: In Acrobat, a quick look at the PDF’s Document Properties dialog box (File > Properties, or Command/Control-D) told me that the PDF was not tagged. How could I tell if my client’s PDF was tagged or not? The answer is to make sure the PDF is “tagged” (made accessible to people with screen readers) before you copy text from it. Luckily, sometime in the recent past - don’t remember how or when - I picked up a nugget of information that allowed me to quickly fix the problem in Acrobat so that the pasted text came in properly (this one example and the others from the PDF), like so: Obviously it’d be quick work to clean up those six lines in InDesign, but this was only the first of many different text selections I’d need to copy/paste from the PDF.
COPY AND PASTE TEXT FROM A PDF DOWNLOAD
You can download the PDFs from their Online Archives page.)
They’re from the Chicago Creative Coalition newsletter, a wonderful organization. (To protect my client’s privacy, I’m using a different PDF for these screen shots. On the left, the selected text in Acrobat Pro 8, on the right, the pasted result in InDesign: Of course, I was in a hurry, and of course, the copy came in with a hard return at the end of every line. The other day I needed to copy a paragraph of text from a client-supplied PDF into an InDesign layout.