PDF has garbled text when copy pasting

Simplest way to get around this is to open the file in a recent version of Google Chrome with built-in PDF reading plugin. Then you can use Chrome's search feature to find text, and copy-paste works correctly.

I would like to vote up pipitas's comment on Shiki's answer, but I don't have the creds :( The problem may be custom font encoding, not encryption. In Acrobat, click File -> Properties, then click the Fonts tab to see encoding, and the Security tab to see whether it's encrypted.

Solution that worked for me:

• Upload the document to Google Drive/Docs
• Google will import it (as of 2013) as a PDF
• Open the PDF view and choose File > Open With > Google Docs
• It will take about a minute to export the document

The results weren't perfect, but got me 80% of the way there and provide me with enough text that I didn't have to rewrite everything!

I discovered this problem with PDFs I created, and I believe I tracked down the source of the problem: using Mac OS X's Preview to reduce the PDF file size.

I had created some Quartz filters using Colorsync Utility to compress images in PDFs to reduce the overall file size of PDFs with images. Such as described here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031106133852693

I found that I am able to easily copy and paste text from the original (uncompressed) PDF file, but after running that PDF through a Reduce File Size filter I created, the resulting compressed PDF doesn't copy paste clearly (comes out looking like the strings you posted).

However running that same original PDF through Adobe Acrobat Pro's Document > Reduce File Size function, the resulting compressed PDF can successfully copy and paste text.

So, this is not totally helpful in your case, presuming that your PDF file was received from elsewhere and you can't get to the original version, if it was indeed compressed in some way. But that might be the explanation - that the file was mangled somehow in an effort to reduce the file size.

This might be useful for content creators running into similar problems copying and pasting text from PDFs - be careful using OS X Quartz filters to shrink your PDFs!

--edit-- I have also noticed this problem when combining PDFs with Preview. The two source PDFs can be copied and pasted fine, but when dragging a page from one file into the other file, then saving the combined PDF, the text in the combined document can't be copy/pasted. These are two documents both generated at the same time with Filemaker Pro 11 on Mac - I can't imagine they would have different encodings or any such thing.

There is another very easy way to make a workaround :)

Just print the document using CutePdf, Adobe 2 Pdf printer or any similar stuff. The bottom line is, that you need to print into the pdf format.

In many cases it will easily remove the problem.