copy and pasting from PDF to Word for Mac

What app are you using to view the pdf file? Preview? Acrobat Reader?

Also... are you working with a PDF of a scanned document or a PDF that was created directly from a word processing application (as in saving a Word document to a PDF)?

Yes, you can download Adobe Reader for free.

If you scanned the book pages as image files, that's why you can't select any of the text: it isn't text at all, but merely an array of pixels of different shades. It's a picture, not a sequence of ASCII characters.

If you scanned the pages using optical character recognition software, that software identified the patterns of pixels to the best of its ability and created a text block containing ASCII characters within the PDF file format in which you saved it. In that case you should be able to use the Text cursor in Preview or Adobe Reader to copy all or part of the text and paste it into a text-handling application like word or TextEdit.

But from what you describe, I presume you scanned and saved the pages as images, not text. In that case, you can only copy and paste whole pages or the whole PDF document, and none of the text you scanned is editable in any word or text processor.

Post back if this is unclear to you.

Note that as eww stated, Acrobat Reader will not allow you to select text in your scanned document. For that, you'd need optical character recognition (OCR) software (not free).

If you haven't needed Acrobat Reader yet, I wouldn't bother - Apple's own Preview is better, IMO. The only time I've needed Acrobat Reader is for some pdf fill-in forms.

I'm glad you've got the problem licked now, or at least understand the limitations on some of your downloaded PDF documents. I suspect those limitations will apply to all documents that are downloaded from the same database or source, and will consistently not apply to documents downloaded from specific other databases, because of differences in the way documents are scanned by different database services.

By way of clarification, let me just point out that what you are calling Acrobat, which used to be called *Acrobat Reader,* is now officially called *Adobe Reader.* Adobe changed the name to distinguish more clearly between Acrobat — an expensive commercial application for +creating, modifying and manipulating+ PDF files — and the freeware Adobe Reader, which only enables you to view them. You'll avoid needless confusion by calling the Reader by its proper name in the future. No big deal, though: lots of people make the same mistake here. (I've explained this distinction to my wife any number of times, and have finally learned not to bother doing it again: she simply doesn't care.) 😉