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Topic: Can't search inside or copy from PDF
Conf: (P-PDF) What's Wrong with my PDF?, Msg: 160581
From: yuricake
Date: 6/8/2007 11:52 AM

Hi,

I download a lot of academic PDFs, and I find that some of them, when opened in Reader, are unsearchable, and the text inside isn't copyable.

Here's an example of such a PDF:

http://www.grouplens.org/papers/pdf/algs.pdf

I have Acrobat Reader 7.0 and Adobe Acrobat 7.0. In both, if I search for a word such as "collaborative" (clearly is present in the text), nothing is found. Then, if I select some text, right-click and copy to clipboard, then when I paste it into Word, it pastes in lots of gibberish.

I read somewhere that I should try running "recognize text" in Acrobat, but that came back with a "this page contains renderable text" message - it seems like all the characters are actual text, except with some weirdness built in.

Any ideas? Thank you all very much in advance.
YN