Comments on: Copying/Pasting Text from PDFs to InDesign

By: amaltra

amaltra — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 02:55:32 +0000

NOW in cs4, can we paste the text as Alexandre Giesbrecht mentioned?
“ID CS4 should add something close to Dreamweaver’s “Paste text only” (Ctrl+Shift+V, then Enter on the dialog box). It gives the exact same result than pasting it from a tagged PDF”

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:03:39 +0000

Bo, do you have the Create Tagged PDF checkbox turned on in the Export PDF dialog box? That should help keep paragraphs together. However, if it’s really just a bunch of individual paragraphs already (in ID), then you’ll likely have to convert those paragraph returns into shift-returns (hard returns) to fake a single paragraph.

By: Bo

Bo — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 18:03:04 +0000

When exporting a PDF. Does anyone know how to get a paragraph with multiple lines of text to be exported to one text object in the PDF?

By: tricia

tricia — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 01:42:24 +0000

i’m so glad that i’m not alone on this! i thought it’s me being un-techy to know the workaround… thank you so much for sharing this.

By: pethr

pethr — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:29:42 +0000

Thank you! I bet this will come handy soon but more importantly I will learn more on creating accessible PDFs. It’s important to me since I know that some of our readers use assistive devices and I haven’t made enough for them. Mostly because of my ignorance, I supposed PDFs are accessible by design but now I see that pages with multiple frames for headlines, text, captions, etc. are not very friendly and that I could do better.:-p

By: Walt Shiel

Walt Shiel — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:15:03 +0000

Great tip! I only wish I knew about it a long time ago. I hate to think of how much time I’ve wasted patching up text copied from a PDF…

But, FYI (Rick A.), both “chomping at the bit” and “champing at the bit” are correct. As are “chaise longue” and “chaise lounge.”

By: Rick A

Rick A — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:35:34 +0000

I just had the opportunity to use this on an 80-pg PDF full of tables that I needed to copy individual cells from and it worked perfectly!

By: Jean-François

Jean-François — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:21:54 +0000

Great tip!
Can anybody confirm or deny that it also works in Acrobat Standard?

By: Rick A

Rick A — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:09:29 +0000

Re: “champing at the bit”

You got it right! I am so tired of correcting people who are “chomping at the bit.” Now, if we could just get a chaise LONGUE trend going.

Seriously, though, thanks for the tip….very useful

By: Alexandre Giesbrecht

Alexandre Giesbrecht — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:19:19 +0000

ID CS4 should add something close to Dreamweaver’s “Paste text only” (Ctrl+Shift+V, then Enter on the dialog box). It gives the exact same result than pasting it from a tagged PDF.