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Copy and paste from PDF in Preview results in gibberish

When I copy and then paste text from a PDF in Preview into Pages, the resulting text is gibberish symbols. The odd thing is it only happens with some text in the PDF and other PDFs do the same thing.

I have a screen recording to demonstrate my problem. http://blip.tv/file/2823667 View it in full screen to see the text.

MacBook 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6.1), iWork '09

Posted on Nov 8, 2009 5:40 PM

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38 replies

Nov 8, 2009 6:02 PM in response to skidogallard

The general approach at this time is to ask if you've checked for any problematic fonts (all languages) with Apple's Font Book (look in the Applications folder). Find and remove all duplicates also.

Start there to be sure all fonts that are in play come out with a clean bill of health.

Don't hesisate to perform wholesale deletion of old and/or little used fonts - be skeptical of anything that has come from Office 2008, including those related to an Equation Editor installation.

Nov 8, 2009 7:10 PM in response to skidogallard

When I copy and then paste text from a PDF in Preview into Pages, the resulting text is gibberish symbols.


Do you have the same problem when pasting into TextEdit? Or when doing the copy/paste from Adobe Reader?

In general, the PDF format is not reliable for copy/paste operations, as some methods used to encode text in it make this operation impossible.

Nov 9, 2009 11:44 AM in response to skidogallard

Can you provide a link to a publicly available PDF that produces this problem?

Apple did make changes to PDF copying and pasting in an attempt to extract higher quality text. Sometimes you would get spaces between each letter.

If I had such a PDF I could compare the differences in 10.5.8 and 10.6 and provide a bug report (with offending PDF document) to Apple.

Nov 9, 2009 12:31 PM in response to skidogallard

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/86630/internet%20use%20decreases%20social%20interaction. pdf


It looks to me like that part of the text has been transcoded into the Unicode Private Use Area for some reason. I've seen in this various other pdf's, and I think it is a bug in the app which produced the pdf. PUA code points are undefined, so the OS displays the Last Resort Font symbol for that range.

Nov 9, 2009 1:38 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Tom Gewecke wrote:
Perhaps it was done on purpose


The doc data says there are no restrictions regarding copy, print, change, or save. Adobe Reader properties indicates some non-standard fonts are used -- presumably that is what happened in the parts that can't be copied.


I was thinking about if maybe they didn't want just that portion to be copied.

Copy and paste from PDF in Preview results in gibberish

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