How can I copy this quote from PDF?

Question

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PDF has garbled text when copy pasting

I'm reading a PDF copy of Jerome H. Friedman's paper "Data Mining and Statistics: What's the Connection?" using Google Chrome.

It contains an amusing quote that I want to copy and paste to my blog.

I used the mouse to select the text of the quote and pressed CTRL + C to copy the text. The document looks like this:

When I paste the text into Notepad, Stack Overflow, or anywhere else, the product is Wingdings-like gibberish:

➣✍❺❼⑤➭✸❸❊➁❥❸❊⑥▼❽❾❸✘➎✳❸❾②❘➊➥❸❊❸❊⑥❦⑨❘②③✇▲➆ ②❥⑤⑩⑨❘②❥⑤⑩❽❾⑤⑩✇➄⑥▼⑨❏✇➄⑥▼❺➌❽❾❻➀➍♣➂⑦❶❼②❥❸❊➁❷⑨❥❽❾⑤❸❊⑥✗②❥⑤⑩⑨❘②③⑨✘⑤⑥☎②❥➇⑦⑤⑩⑨ ➔❸❊➅⑩❺➌⑨❹❸❊❸❊➍P⑨①②❥❻ ➎✳❸❏②❥➇▼✇▲②➟➊❚➇⑦❸❊⑥✆✇P⑨❘②③✇▲②❥⑤⑩⑨❘②❥⑤⑩❽❾⑤⑩✇➄⑥❦➇▼✇➀⑨↔✇➄⑥❦⑤⑩❺❼❸✶✇♣➇⑦❸❷❻➀➁↔⑨❹➇⑦❸❷➊❚➁❥⑤②❥❸✶⑨ ✇❨➂▼✇➄➂✳❸❊➁✶Þ⑦✇♣❽❾❻➀➍♣➂⑦❶❼②❥❸❊➁➟⑨❥❽❾⑤❸❊⑥✗②❥⑤⑩⑨❘②↔⑨❘②③✇➄➁❹②③⑨❚✇♣❽❾❻➀➍♣➂▼✇➄⑥☛➧➀➏

The text should instead look like this:

A difference between statisticians and computer scientists in this field seems to be that when a statistician has an idea he or she writes a paper; a computer scientist starts a company.

I had to type that text out manually. This is feasible for such a small quote, but how do I actually copy what I see?

Is it something unusual about the PDF, the browser, the plugin, or some combiniation of the three?

Answer 1

Most reliable way of doing it is by using OCR.

But as a dirty and fast solution you can use Google Quick View from the search result for your link, in Quick view use option View > Plain HTML.

It still contains some garbled text and is quite unreadable but a large amount of text is correct and copy-able. Search works here so you can use it to locate the target text and copy it without any garbled text.

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Detailed Example here:

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Then use View option Plain HTML.

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On Google's HTML version, you can search and select the equivalent text like this:

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Pasting into Notepad produces this output:

A difference between sta-tisticians and computer scientists in this field seems tobe that when a statistician has an idea he or she writesa paper; a computer scientist starts a company.

Not exactly as displayed, but close enough that you can work with it.

Answer 2

You'll have to discard the corrupted text that's already associated with the PDF before you can re-OCR it. The easiest way to do that is to save it in TIFF format, then open it with Acrobat and re-OCR it. When I did that, it worked for me.

Answer 3

Looks like a PDF with incorrect encoding. See the following threads:

• Copy text from a PDF to word. Just get Symbols

• PDF has garbled text when copy pasting

• search PDFs with non-standard character encodings

Try printing the PDF using CutePDF, then see if the resulting PDF is any better.