Extracting text from PDF?

Question

There is a PDF file, which contains mainly text. However some parts of these texts are impossible to select and copy:

And when I select this:

So:

ult. Optimist

becomes

ult. Op mist

What is causing this, and can I somehow overcome on this limitation?

Answer 1

It may be because the program that wrote the PDF has "flattened" the "ti" ligature into a graphics line-draw/fill object.

It might be that the "ti" ligature encoding is not recognised by the target into which you pasted the text.

It looks like the first is more likely the case if your image represents the text selection in a PDF viewer itself.

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There are many other difficult problems in extracting plain text from all possible PDFs.

• how to extract text from pdf with embedded subset fonts
• How to find out why is text not searchable in a PDF (and make it searchable)

So there might not be any easy solution for this.