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Working with Text in Adobe Acrobat Pro:
COPY TEXT TO OTHER SOFTWARE APPLICATIONS,
USE BUILT-IN OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION,
MAKE CORRECTIONS WITH THE TOUCHUP TEXT TOOL
By Jim Hinshaw, Austin, Texas, 1-512-347-3504, hinshaw@pbworld.com
Figure 1: Text
selection.
Most PB computers have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional installed thanks to a corporate license.
Many users are not aware, however, that editable text can be copied from unsecured Acrobat files and
pasted into Microsoft Word or other files. Acrobat even has a built-in optical character recognition
function that lets users create editable text from scanned documents. These techniques will not work
with Acrobat Reader software.
Selecting and Copying Text
Copying and pasting an image, text, and tables from a .PDF
document to an MS Word document is easy. Click the Text
Selection Tool (Figure 1), and click and drag over the text you
wish to copy. Copy the text to the clip board (click on Copy
under the Edit menu), and then paste it into your text document.
This technique should work with any software that handles
text and has a paste command. If you want to select all
the text on a page, click your right mouse button and choose
Select All from the contextual pop-up menu.
Let your mouse hover over the selected text for a moment
and you will see an Acrobat button appear. Move your mouse
over the button, and more buttons appear giving you several
options for copying or marking up the text (Figure 2.). Or,
right click your mouse and this list will appear.
If you want to copy all the text in a .PDF file and retain the formatting, choose
Save As under the File menu and select Rich Text Format from the Save as type
pop-up menu. Then save the document as a Rich Text Format (*.rtf) file. Microsoft
Word will open the Rich Text file as if it were a native Word document. Be aware
that text spanning several pages may contain header and footer text that you may
not want to keep.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Copying Text
Figure 2: Options for
copying or marking
text.
If you have a document that you want to copy text from but can’t select the text, it
is likely that the document was scanned. You are seeing a picture of the text that is
not editable. Acrobat comes to the rescue with its built-in OCR function. OCR is a process whereby the
software recognizes letter forms and converts their images into editable text. Click on the Document
menu at the top of your window and select the Recognize Text Using OCR command (Figure 3
on the following page). For most scanned documents, you can use the Start sub-command to
convert all letter forms to editable text. A dialog box will appear asking you to specify the pages
that you want converted.
After Acrobat has finished OCR, use the copy and paste steps outlined above. It is a really good idea
to proof-read the text after copying it, however, because OCR can make mistakes with a poor quality
original.
99 PB Network #68 / August 2008