I have asked this question on Upwork.com and Adobe Support forums but no one has been able to provide an answer.
When I convert a Microsoft Word document to PDF (using either the Adobe Printer or Save As > PDF), the Unicode text in the document does not encode properly. The text appears correct, but when I copy and paste it to another program, such as Notepad, there are errors:
For example, the text in Microsoft Word is
बूढ़े पिता ने ऐसी भूमिका ...
The text appears correct in the PDF file, but when I copy and paste it Notepad, it is:
बूढ़े पता ने ऐसी भूमका ...
Note the boxes.
This erroneous encoding means it is not possible to search the PDF document properly. For example, if I search for पिता (the second word), I will not get a match. I would have to search पता.
Embedding the fonts makes no difference.
Please advise how I can create a PDF properly, so that the encoding is exactly like it is in any other program, i.e. without any of these boxes or other issues.
Thank you
Today i tried to search a Arabic word in a PDF file that contained Arabic content.
All PDF reader soft wares cannot search any Arabic word in this PDF file.
So I dragged PDF file into Firefox browser and selected a area that contained some words by inspect elements and saw this:
hw ½oiC instead of آخرین سخن
What is type of the encoding used in this PDF file?
how can i encode this to normal text?
It's difficult to comment on the file you are looking at without seeing it but a good starting point is to try Acrobat and by either copying the text and pasting it into a text editor or doing a search for the text content will reveal if it can be extracted correctly or not.
If it can't be extracted properly then there's a good chance the font is lacking a ToUnicode entry (see Section 9.10.1 of the ISO PDF 32000-1:2008 specification for more information).
I have a piece of software called PDF2XL which is normally great for extracting tables of data from PDF files. I've used it with hundreds of files before.
This one file though, gives me gibberish output that I can't even copy and paste into this textarea correctly. All sorts of unicode weirdness.
If I copy and paste as per normal into excel/notepad I get the same issue.
I assume it's something to do with a messed up character encoding header in the PDF file? How can I change this? I'm on Windows and have no software that can edit PDFs, so if I need to edit/re-save it, please recommend a free piece of SW to do it.
Thanks!
There are an increasing number of PDF files the used subsetted fonts which is basically a custom encoding. Normally the font descriptor in the PDF should have a ToUnicode table to allow the text extraction to decode the font encoding and return the correct text.
Some PDF producers are doing this on purpose to prevent easy PDF text extraction for things such as financial reports. If there is only one font then you could manually decode the font but in my experience I have seen PDF's with multiple random encodings which makes it nearly impossible to decode automatically.
One way to test for these types of PDF's is to open the file in Acrobat, select some text, copy it and then paste it into Notepad. If the text is garbled then the PDF is using a subsetted font and there is not much more you can do. If Acrobat can't extract the text correctly then nothing else can. It may as well be a page of hieroglyphs.
I have PDF files with text that should be replaced. More specificly, the text should be translated and replaced with the translated version.
It's important that the rest of the PDF structure stays intact. Note that the text is available in the PDFs and techniques like OCr are not needed. Also, it would be nice if font and other text attributes are kept.
Which libraries would you recommend for extracting the text to an easy to edit format (such as CSV) and put the new text back in again?
Assuming you are replacing text with a different language, you will have to choose a different font in most cases, and the font choice is non-trivial. I've used the Foxit libraries to change text or create PDFs with success.
I am writing a Master's thesis - NLP system. I have one component - extractor.
It is extracting a plain text from PDF files. There are a few PDF files that can not be extracted correctly. Extractor (PDFBox library) returns a string like this:
"┤xDn║if|d├gDF"Ti&cD╬lh d FÁhis~n ╗xd f«"d┤ffih »h"
or
"10a61a91a22a25a3a27a17a23a20a8a13a14a61a25a17"
I was checking each file that makes this extraction's problem and all these files' text also can not be copy-pasted from PDF Reader (Adobe Reader and FoxIt reader). Viewing them in this readers is enabled, but after selecting its content and copying to the clipboard I get the same wrong text (as described above - strings of not semantically correct chars or strings of digits and letters).
Could anybody help me???
Very often in such cases, where you can't select, copy'n'paste text from the Acrobat (Reader) window, there is another option which may work nevertheless:
Open 'File' menu,
select 'Save as...',
select 'Text (normal) (*.txt)',
browse to the target directory,
type the name you want to use for the text file.
You'll have all text from all pages in the file and need to locate the spot you wanted to copy'n'paste initially -- insofar it is not as comfortable as direct copy'n'paste. But it works more reliably....
It also works with acroread on Linux (but you have to choose 'Save as text...' from the file menu).
Update
You can use the pdffonts command line utility to get a quick-shot analysis of the fonts used by a PDF.
Here is an example output, which demonstrates where a problem for text extraction will very likely occur. It uses one of these hand-coded PDF files from a GitHub-Repository which was created to provide PDF sample files which are well commented and may easily be opened in a text editor:
$ pdffonts textextract-bad2.pdf
name type encoding emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------- ------------ ----------- --- --- --- ---------
BAAAAA+Helvetica TrueType WinAnsi yes yes yes 12 0
CAAAAA+Helvetica-Bold TrueType WinAnsi yes yes no 13 0
How to interpret this table?
The above PDF file uses two subsetted fonts (as indicated by the BAAAAA+ and CAAAAA+ prefixes to their names, as well as by the yes entries in the sub column), Helvetica and Helvtica-Bold.
Both fonts are of type TrueType.
Both fonts use a WinAnsi encoding (a font encoding maps char identifiers used in the PDF source code to glyphs that should be drawn).
However, only for font /Helvetica there is a /ToUnicode table available inside the PDF (for /Helvetica-Bold there is none), as indicated by the yes/no in the uni-column).
The /ToUnicode table is required to provide a reverse mapping from character identifiers/codes to characters.
A missing /ToUnicode table for a specific font is almost always a sure indicator that text strings using this font cannot be extracted or copied'n'pasted from the PDF. (Even if a /ToUnicode table is there, text extraction may still pose a problem, because this table may be damaged, incorrect or incomplete -- as seen in many real-world PDF files, and as also demonstrated by a few companion files in the above linked GitHub repository.)
If are able to successfully select and copy the text in Adobe Reader -- indicated that the PDF does contain text objects -- but you can't paste the copied text into Notepad without it looking like a bunch of garbage characters, then the problem is probably related to the CMap that the selected text uses.
The PDF specification provides many options for the display of textual content and the related extraction of the text content. A CMap specifies the mapping from character codes to character selectors. The PDF spec outlines some predefined CMaps, but other CMaps can also be embedded.
My guess is that either the CMap for this text is corrupt or that the PDFBox library doesn't support this particular CMap. I suggest trying a different SDK just to see if you get any different results.
When opened as a Gmail attachment in Chrome (the internal PDF browser) copying does copy normal readable characters!
It worked for me when I had this problem and for others as well. I think the Chrome PDF viewer uses the Google Drive OCR automatically... It's like magic!
What was the PDF created with. Some PDFs do not contain any encoding information, just the data to draw it. So there is no way to extract the data.
Select the text you wish to copy.
Right click
Choose option "Export Selection as"
In the dialog box, choose a file name and save the new file as Rich Text Format (RTF)
Open RTF to see your text!
The best way to deal with this is Convert PDF file to Word by using this website.
https://www.ilovepdf.com/pdf_to_word
The garbage issue will be fixed
The best way to deal with this is (assuming you have Adobe Acrobat, or something similar, not sure if Reader can do this) is save the doc as a JPEG. Then recompile all the images as a single pdf, then use the OCR function to find text in the pages, then you can copy and paste the text.
PDF is not a text document. It's more of a vector graphic format that sometimes can contain text. So there are some documents from which you can't extract text unless you are willing to do OCR. That's just the way it is.