The Computer Oracle

Can't copy text from a pdf file

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Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Secret Catacombs

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Chapters
00:00 Question
00:34 Accepted answer (Score 46)
01:10 Answer 2 (Score 41)
01:36 Answer 3 (Score 19)
02:10 Answer 4 (Score 3)
02:34 Thank you

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Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/47462/ca...

Accepted answer links:
["Remove Password and Unlock Protected PDF Which Allowed To Be Printed Without Knowing Secret"]: http://www.tipandtrick.net/2008/remove-p.../
["Remove Restrictions and Decrypt Password Protected PDF Files With PDF Unlocker"]: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/07/10.../

Answer 3 links:
[Ghostscript]: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghostscr.../

Answer 4 links:
https://smallpdf.com/unlock-pdf

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Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

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Tags
#pdf #copypaste #copyprotection

#avk47



ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 50


The pdf file has probably been locked against copying text. Below are two ways to unlock it:

  1. If the pdf has not been locked against printing, you can print it to a virtual pdf printer to create an unlocked file. See this:
    "Remove Password and Unlock Protected PDF Which Allowed To Be Printed Without Knowing Secret".
  2. If the print function has been locked out, see this :
    "Remove Restrictions and Decrypt Password Protected PDF Files With PDF Unlocker".



ANSWER 2

Score 45


  1. Open the PDF in Google Chrome(drag and drop PDF file to Chrome).
  2. Print the particular page as PDF or just open print preview.
  3. Now you can copy the text from print preview or output PDF. But I don't think you could copy the table directly.



ANSWER 3

Score 20


I was able to create a DRM-free version of your PDF file using Ghostscript (which is available for Windows).

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=stripped.pdf VassilakisP2001Dissertation.pdf

The resulting file stripped.pdf can be loaded in Adobe Reader, and Reader will happily allow you to copy any part of it you wish. It also preserves most of the formatting of the table.




ANSWER 4

Score 2


I was able to copy the table from your PDF file successfully using Okular (for Linux; part of KDE). To do this, I had to go into Okular's settings and uncheck "Obey DRM restrictions."

I'm aware that this doesn't really help you much since you're running Windows, but it is a possibility if you have a Linux machine handy or are willing to install it.

Unfortunately it was plain text with no formatting, but it looks like it shouldn't be too hard to recreate the table. You can see the results of my copy and paste adventure here.