How do I copy and paste sentences from a pdf (Acrobat 7.0) file ?

[Guest]

I can copy and paste an image of the text but I cannot copy and paste
sentences and then reformat them in Word. Any ideas?

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Are you sure the Acrobat file actually contains text? Some folks
deliberately make pdf files as graphics to prevent folks from easily copying
text (fear of plagiarism).

 

[Guest]

Thanks, Herb. The file is made up entirely of text, but it is presented in
table form. It is complied by several different people (authorless) and it
is my duty to manipulate the data into a a different form (Word document) for
a formal report. I can lift the "images", even one sentence at a time, but I
cannot manipulate the sentence structure, paragraphing, etc. I was wondering
if it might be possible to scan the document into a form that would be
possible to copy and paste from?

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Note that there is a difference between actual text and pictures of text. It
sounds like you have pictures of text. Again, that sometimes is done
deliberately to make the text less accessible.

If you can save the pages as tif files (either by scanning or directly from
Acrobat Professional-not sure if the reader can do this), you should be able
to use Microsoft Office Document Imaging to OCR the text.

 

[Guest]

Thanks again, Herb. Yes, I can scan them as a tif file but I am not familiar
with the MODI to OCR(?) the text. What is the term OCR?

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

OCR is Optical Character Recognition. For clean text, Microsoft Office
Document Imaging is quite effective. In Office XP and 2003, it's in the
Office Tools folder.

Open the tif using MODI -- on my system, MODI is the default application for
tif files. If it's not the default on yours, right-click the tif, and choose
Open With, and see if MODI is listed. If not, then either you didn't install
it, or you have an earlier version of Office.

Once open, choose Tools - Recognize text using OCR. Then Tools - Send Text
to Word.