I have a PDF that I was trying to extract the text from in order to re-write the document (some old test procedures from a client written by an ex-employee) but it appears it is impossible to extract any meaningful text from the PDF.

It displays all OK on screen but save as text just produces gibberish.

Before you think security settings, text extraction and so on all allowed in the PDF. It appears that there is a problem with the font used for the main body text in that it has 'built in encoding' from what I can gather off the document's properties.

So what you get is (and this just a little bit)

Title:

Page 1 of 8

1. GENERAL PURPOSE TEST EQUIPMENT REQUIRED

etc.. The subheadings appear OK but not the main text.

I've said 'sod it' and manually typed it all in after faffing around with various ideas - trying 'print to text' using the generic Windows driver, making a new PDF from this one with Jaws PDF printer driver, mucking about with Ghostscript etc all to no avail. I do not have any access to the full Adobe Acrobat Creator application (distiller is it?).

Anyway, I thought some might be interested in this problem, both if there is a way around this problem but also in how to recreate this as it would be very handy to intentionally apply this to PDFs so people can't (easily!) extract the text!

Oddly not found much reference to it on the 'net, though might be using the wrong search terminology to find a webpage about it.

Cheers to computers making less work

Bummer. :thumbdwn: Before I'd tried it for myself, I'd've suggested scanning it to capture the text by OCR. But having done it, I know it takes almost as long to proof-read the output as it does to type from scratch...

Are you using acrobat reader... the full suite will let you actually edit the PDF so might be cheaper than a lot of spent time.

have you tried it with Foxit PDF Reader

Foxit Software

freeware - though some of the addons are not (read lower down)

"Text converter: You may convert the whole PDF document into a simple text file. "

"View PDF as text"

have you tried it with Foxit PDF Reader

Foxit Software

freeware - though some of the addons are not (read lower down)

"Text converter: You may convert the whole PDF document into a simple text file. "

"View PDF as text"

Nice PDF viewer that, thanks but doesn't extract the text either, I've been told it is impossible due to the custom encoding used on the main text's font in the file.