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How to Copy Text From a PDF That Will Not Let You Copy

By the Datatool360 team ·

You open a PDF, try to select a sentence, and nothing is highlighted. Or it is highlighted but pastes as strange symbols. It is annoying, and the reason is not always the same. This guide helps you find which of the three common causes you have, and what to do about each one.

Want to do it right now? Open the PDF to Text tool

Cause 1: the page is a picture (a scan)

This is by far the most common one. A scanned page, or a photo saved as PDF, has no text inside, only a picture of text. You cannot select it, because to the computer there are no letters, only coloured dots.

How to check: try to select a single word, or press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for a word you can see. If the program finds nothing and cannot highlight anything, it is a picture.

What to do: use OCR, optical character recognition, which reads the letters from the picture. In the PDF to Text tool, pages that are pictures are read with OCR automatically (English). You get text that you can copy, edit and download as TXT, Markdown, Word or JSON.

Cause 2: the file asks you not to copy

A PDF can carry restrictions set by the person who made it: no copying, no printing, no editing. Many programs then grey out the copy command. The text is there, but the viewer follows the restriction.

How to check: the document properties of your viewer usually show which actions are allowed. If it says that copying is not permitted, this is your case.

What to do, if you are allowed to use the content: the Lock & Unlock PDF tool can save a copy of such a file without the restrictions. A file that only has a permissions password opens without a password, so you can unlock it by leaving the password field empty. A file that needs a password to open needs that password. Please only do this with files that you own or may change. The restrictions were set by someone for a reason, and copying text from other people’s work can break their rights.

Cause 3: it copies, but as gibberish

Sometimes the text can be selected, but pasting it gives rows of symbols, wrong letters, or words with missing characters. This happens when the PDF stores its letters in a way that does not map back to normal text, which is common with some fonts, with maths and with languages that have complex scripts.

What to do: try the PDF to Text tool, which rebuilds the text and the reading order itself, and compare the result with the page that is shown next to it. If the text is still broken, the PDF simply does not hold usable text. Then the only way is to read the page as a picture with OCR, which means taking a screenshot or an image of the page and running that through a tool that reads pictures.

After you get the text

  • Read it against the original. Especially with a scan, OCR can mix up characters that look alike, such as 0 and O, or 1 and l. Numbers, dates and names deserve a second look.
  • Columns and tables are the next problem. A normal copy mixes columns; PDF to Text reads columns one after the other and keeps tables as tables.
  • For maths, use the Math PDF converter, which keeps equations as LaTeX.

A note on privacy

PDF to Text sends your file to our server and keeps it in memory for about 30 minutes, so that you can see and download the result. It is not written to disk. If a document is very private, think about whether you want to send it anywhere, and see the privacy page for the details. The Lock & Unlock tool, in contrast, runs in your browser.

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