Re: PDFs and Word documents

"Herb Tyson [MVP]" <herb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
It depends on what you're using to read the .pdf files. Using the free
Foxit reader, for example, click the Select Text tool, select what you want
to copy, press Ctrl+C, then switch to Word and press Ctrl+V. There is some
corresponding tool in the free Adobe Reader.

With Acrobat Reader, generally more expedient to run Edit > Select All, Edit
Copy, switch to Work, create a new document, Edit > Paste into that new
document, then selectively copy/paste from there. That assumes the PDF was
generated from text rather than scanned images.

It also depends on what kinds of protection have been written into the .pdf
file. When using Adobe Acrobat (I have 7 pro) to create a file, you can
disable the ability to copy text. If that's the case, you'd be out of luck
(unless copying permission is password protected and you have the
password).
....

Two points. OCR, either through printing the PDF file to an MDI file, then
using MSFT Document Imaging or more directly using SnagIt or its ilk, can
pull text from 'protected' PDF files. Second, there may still be a public
domain PDF to Text utility on Simtel.net. It's a command line utility
written in the Acrobat 2.x days, prior to Adobe's introduction of PDF
'security' features. It happily converts current, 'protected' PDF files to
plain text files since it simply ignores the 'security' features.

Simple rule for the digital age: anything viewable on screen can be copied
to any other document, and converting the image to text isn't too difficult,
only time-consuming, in the age of cheap OCR. Copyright laws still apply,
but those include Fair Use.


.

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