Paste from PDF in Preview creates gibberish after annotations

I've seen several posts about this but have not been able to find an actual solution and it would not let me reply to any of the posts...
I open a PDF in Preview. It functions just fine (I can copy and paste normally).
I then make some annotations (highlighting, adding arrows etc...)
I save.
I open the file later to make more annotations.
I can no longer copy and paste. Well, I CAN but it just pastes nonsense. If I open it in Acrobat Pro, it acts the same way.
I first noticed this when using text to speech. I often have my computer read to me as I follow along highlighting as needed. I do a lot of research so the text to speech option saves my eyes sometimes. Anyway, the text to speech works the same as the copy/paste. It reads just fine at first, then after some annotations, something slips up and it starts reading the same thing that it would copy and paste. For example..
"Ten Reasons for IT Educators to be Early Adopters of IT Innovations"
becomes
"./%(@/&A"%A()"$(*.(45#0&,"$A(,"(B/(( 4&$'3(C5"D,/$A(")(*.(*%%"E&,-"%A("
Help?

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/86630/internet%20use%20decreases%20social%20interaction. pdf
It looks to me like that part of the text has been transcoded into the Unicode Private Use Area for some reason. I've seen in this various other pdf's, and I think it is a bug in the app which produced the pdf. PUA code points are undefined, so the OS displays the Last Resort Font symbol for that range.

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Copy and paste from PDF in Preview results in gibberish

When I copy and then paste text from a PDF in Preview into Pages, the resulting text is gibberish symbols. The odd thing is it only happens with some text in the PDF and other PDFs do the same thing.
I have a screen recording to demonstrate my problem. http://blip.tv/file/2823667 View it in full screen to see the text.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/86630/internet%20use%20decreases%20social%20interaction. pdf
It looks to me like that part of the text has been transcoded into the Unicode Private Use Area for some reason. I've seen in this various other pdf's, and I think it is a bug in the app which produced the pdf. PUA code points are undefined, so the OS displays the Last Resort Font symbol for that range.

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I've never understood how to copy and paste from pdf to word without getting the line return characters which mess up the formatting. Why doesn't text flow from line to line as it does in a normal word processor? Why does adobe insist on copying the newline character when you paste from pdf to another application?
This must be the dumbest feature in the world.
If there's a way to copy and paste from a pdf in plain text, without line breaks, please please tell me how. Thanks

I don't know a way to do it right out of Adobe, but you can use this tool to do what you're asking: http://www.textfixer.com/tools/remove-line-breaks.php. I routinely have to copy and paste pdf material for the web for a non-profit I work for, and I use that tool every time because it works so well. Plus it's free. If you find out how to do it without using a third-party tool let me know!

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I can select text, but oddly enough it seems to automaitcally select random text - I can't select line to line. It randomly selects parts of all paragraphs at once. I'm very certain it's not an image.
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Hi Everyone,
I've discovered a strange problem in snow leopard. Prior to upgrading to snow leopard, I was able to copy and paste from a PDF in Preview into Word, save as a text file, and preserve the formatting of the original PDF. This was important because I had written a perl program that extracted relevant information from the text file (the one based on the PDF) to generate reports. The PDF was not scanned but generated from some sort of batch program, and the output has columns and rows. I tried to copy and paste today, after upgrading to Snow Leopard yesterday, and no matter what I tried (including paste special) the formatting when copying from the PDF to Word was lost. I tried Adobe reader as well as Skim and tried copying into TextEdit but nothing worked. I even tried exporting from Adobe reader as a text file but have the same problem.
Being a good upgrader, I kept a backup of my Leopard install. After booting from it, copy and paste work as before and I was able to generate a properly formatted text file. From my experience with this, it appears as though the way snow leopard renders a PDF, or works with copying and pasting, is different than previous operating systems. Does anyone happen to know if there is a way to make snow leopard's copying and pasting work as it did in Leopard before?
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Message was edited by: bbjonz

I likewise rely on ChemDraw and Pages/Keynote for my research and teaching. This is unfortunately an enormous problem, as I use these programs on a daily basis. I will be re-installing Leopard until the problem is resolved. Chambridgesoft's reply to the issue is that "The current version of ChemDraw/ChemBioDraw (12.0.0) was developed and released prior to the release of Snow Leopard. Therefore, ChemDraw 12.0.0 has not been officially tested and qualified under this operating system. We hope to support Snow Leopard in future in a future point release." I guess they couldn't get a hold of a development build? As I'm using ChemDraw Ultra 11.0 I will obviously not be supported in any case.
Judging from other replies, the problem seems to stem from SN copying as a .tiff rather than a .pict? Perhaps someone has a fix to make SN copy as .pict?

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It's a limitation of PowerPoint - any line breaks in the pasted text will be converted into a bullet point when pasting into a the standard slide layouts, which apply bullets to the text content by default. You can't avoid copying the line breaks as they're present in the original text, so you need to remove them by hand after pasting.

Extract All Embedded Files in All Folders and Save Each? Copy/Paste from PDF to Word?

I have most of what I need here, but I’m missing 2 important pieces.
#1) I want to copy/paste from all PDF files in a folder and paste the copied data into a single Word file.
It works fine if I have ONLY Word docs in my folder. When I have PDF files and Word files, the contents of the Word files are copied in fine, but the contents of the PDF files seem to come in as Chinese, and there is no Chinese in
the PDF, so I have no idea where that’s coming from.
#2) I want to extract all embedded files (in all my Word files) and save the extracted/opened file into the folder. Some embedded files are PDFs and some are Excel files.
Here the code that I’m working with now.
Sub Foo()
Dim i As Long
Dim MyName As String, MyPath As String
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Documents.Add
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MyName = Dir$(MyPath & "*.*") ' not *.* if you just want doc files
On Error Resume Next
Do While MyName <> ""
If InStr(MyName, "~") = 0 Then
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ConfirmConversions:=False, Link:=False, _
Attachment:=False
Dim Myshape As InlineShape
Dim IndexCount As Integer
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Next
Selection.InsertBreak Type:=wdPageBreak
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If this has to be done using 2 Macros, that’s fine.
If I can do it in 1, that’s great too.
Knowledge is the only thing that I can give you, and still retain, and we are both better off for it.

Hi ryguy72,
>>When I have PDF files and Word files, the contents of the Word files are copied in fine, but the contents of the PDF files seem to come in as Chinese, and there is no Chinese in the PDF, so I have no idea where that’s coming from.<<
Based on the code, you were insert the file via the code Selection.InsertFile. I am trying to reproduce this issue however failed. I suggest that you insert the PDF file manually to see whether this issue relative to the specific file. You can insert PDF
file via Insert->Text->Object->Text from file.
If this issue also could reproduced manually, I would suggest that you reopen a new thread in forum to narrow down whether this issue relative to the specific PDF file or Word application.
>> I want to extract all embedded files (in all my Word files) and save the extracted/opened file into the folder. Some embedded files are PDFs and some are Excel files.<<
We can save the embedded spreadsheet via Excel object model. Here is an example that check the whether the inlineshape is an embedded workbook and save it to the disk for you reference:
If Application.ActiveDocument.InlineShapes(1).OLEFormat.ClassType = "Excel.Sheet.12" Then
Application.ActiveDocument.InlineShapes(1).OLEFormat.DoVerb xlPrimary
Application.ActiveDocument.InlineShapes(1).OLEFormat.Object.SaveAs "C:\workbook1.xlsx"
Application.ActiveDocument.InlineShapes(1).OLEFormat.Object.Close
End If
And since the Word object model doesn't provide API to save the embedded PDF, I would suggest that you get more effective response from PDF support forum to see whether it supports automation. If yes, we can export the PDF as embedded spreadsheet like code
absolve.
Hope it is helpful.
Regards & Fei
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Paste from PDF in Preview creates gibberish after annotations

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