Feb 15, 2019 Question mark characters displaying within text, why is this? The most common symptom is that character codes above 127 display as black diamonds with question marks on them (in Chrome, Safari or Firefox), or as little boxes (in IE and Opera). Black diamond question mark character on page when UTF8 header sent.
I'm trying to copy and paste text from a PDF file.However, whenever I paste the original text it is a huge mess of garbled characters. The text looks like the following (this is just one small extract): 4$/)5=$13!,4&1.%-! &(!&,$4/-5'8!090-$+!/'1!/,)5%/-5&'!1$2$)&,$40!-&1/97!).+.+, C8513AG. I can also confirm this problem with OS X, at least as of 10.8.2. I've spent a bit of time going through the PDF file structure, but unfortunately I can't see any way to repair the damage. Acrobat Pro's 'PreFlight' does report issues with the file when checking it against the PDF/A standard, and the Inventory report shows the glyphs being mapped against plainly wrong Unicode characters.
I've raised a bug report with Apple - ID 12655651. I'll report back here if/when I get any updates.–Nov 8 '12 at 9:48. I discovered this problem with PDFs I created, and I believe I tracked down the source of the problem: using Mac OS X's Preview to reduce the PDF file size.I had created some Quartz filters using Colorsync Utility to compress images in PDFs to reduce the overall file size of PDFs with images. SOLVED:(worked for me on Windows 8, Acrobat XI, Office 2010)Option 1:.
Print from Acrobat using 'Microsoft XPS Document Writer' Output is: 'your file name.oxps'. Open '.oxps' with XPS Viewer.(see download link in comments below). Print to PDF (Acrobat PDF, or CutePDF), using the highest resolution (600 DPI). Open with Acrobat and use OCR (Searchable Image (Exact)) option.BINGO!Comments:.
Using highest resolution and Searchable Image (exact) will save your text without loosing its clean appearance. Low resolution will make your text readable, but crappy looking. Download Microsoft XPS (files):. If you don't know what OCR is, or where to find Searchable Image (exact), or How to print using 'Microsoft XPS Document Writer', PLEASE, Google it on your own, for your own best experiences.Download only if you do not have XPS installed.Option 2:Do similar, but save as image (png, tiff.), then you will have to combine all pages back in one 'PDF' file.
There is a risk that the information won't be retrievable at all. PDF documents are essentially one document overlying another, one simple text, the other a picture. When you copy and paste from the document, you mark the text while looking at the picture, but what is copied to your clipboard is the corresponding piece of the text part.Depending on the way the document is created, the quality and availability of the text part can differ greatly. If you save a word processor document in PDF format, using Acrobat, Word, a PDF printer driver or any other method, the quality will usually be excellent, since the text file can be created from the text of the original. One possible reason for this could be that font embedding in the PDF was using a custom encoding, which is not correctly applied when copying text from the PDF.You can apply different methods to save yourself from manually typing all of the content.
Did you try to extract the text with one of the 'pdftotext.exe' tools downloadable throughout the 'net? (I'd recommend the one included in ). The latest version of Acrobat Reader have an option 'Save as Text.' This does not use 'copy'n'paste' (which gave you the garbled text), but probably uses the same software routines as used for rendering the text on screen, and may therefor produce more usable results. If '2.' Does not work, and if you have access to Acrobat Professional: try to re-distill the PDF using one of the font-embedding Distiller profiles. If '3.'
Does not work, despite you having access to Acrobat Professional: try to re-distill the PDF, but this time you should use the 'print as image' option (available via the 'Advanced' button in the lower left corner of the main print dialog). Make sure you use 600dpi (although that may produce a huge file). The resulting PDF you then open again in Acrobat Pro. Now apply Acrobat's 'OCR' algorithm to the file, which will result in embedded text (not used for rendering on-screen in the Reader, but used for searching and highlighting strings). Now you can try again to extract the text from this PDF, using either of the above discussed methods.
One of my users just reported the same issue (PDF was created with Distiller for Windows), that copied text is only garbled text and he couldn’t search inside a document. I tried on my Mac and didn't find any issue. It turned out, that I used Apple’s Preview application, while he used Adobe Reader on his Windows machine.
Then I tried Adobe Reader on my Mac an faced the same effect. To me it looks like:.Adobe Reader is coyping and searching in the saved text.Apple’s Preview will copy and search after applying the encoding vector.I can't say this for sure, but it would explain my observation.
And it would indeed allow to make all kinds of encoding when saving combined/reduced files as described in another post here: with Preview you can still get out the text again.First I thought it would be more logical to encode the embedded font subset as contiguous entries instead of leaving holes inside and using the original character location. But then I realized, that by using an encoding vector to the font subset with original entries, characters which are often used can have less bits set to 1 in their byte and can be compressed in a better way (it may lower the entrophy of the overall text this way).
I have not tried the Google Docs option as it is still not supported in my office. However, by printing the file to 'ScanSoft PDF Create!'
From 'Acrobat 9' (prints the entire file to image) and opening the printed file in 'Nuance PDF Converter' (it prompted me if I want to make the image file searchable and editable, which I opted to), I was able to have a Word document I can easily copy and paste from. It's not perfect though with only around around 80-90% accuracy. But hey, you still have the original PDF file to compare with and offset those parts that just can't be fixed. Saves time from typing the whole thing.
I made some editable-text PDFs with an old version of Scansoft PDF Converter for Windows XP, and then combined the pages in Mac's Preview program. For each of the separate pages, I could search, copy and export text correctly from Adobe Reader on the Mac. When combined by Preview and saved as one file, all looked well on screen, but only a few passages were searchable/exportable correctly. That problem brought me here.The posts here gave me some good pointers (thank you!). I looked at the file properties for fonts.
The single page files from Win XP (where all is well) said the encoding was ANSI. The file combined in Preview (where copied text is garbled) showed encoding for most of the fonts as 'Built-in' with a few as 'Roman.' The solution to my problem was under my nose all the time — the Scansoft program itself can combine files. When I used Scansoft's combiner, and opened the file on the Mac, all fonts were shown as ANSI-encoded and all text exported/copied perfectly.
Why on Earth I didn't combine them in PDF Converter in the first place, I don't know. Thanks, posters!Same is true opening the files on a Linux system.I know this doesn't explain the Windows-only problems — unless the PDF had similar mixed origins?