making PDFs workable

[Brian Cluff]

I think I remember that you were running KDE..  If so, the Okular PDF 
viewer will allow you to copy and paste, you just need to be in 
selection mode (Don't polute your KDE install with evince).  Just click 
the "selection" icon or pick "tools -> selection" from the menu (ctrl-3 
will do it too).

You can also load the "libreoffice-pdfimport" package and load PDFs 
directly into openoffice.

Also inkscape can do a VERY good to percfect job of loading a PDF, the 
quality being mostly dependent on if you have all the fonts installed 
that the PDF is using, but it can only handle a single page at a time.

If you have been doing any of that with no luck, you might have a PDF 
where the text is actually a graphics and nothing will allow you to copy 
and paste text in it.  You best bet for those is to extract the graphics 
out of the PDF and see if one of the OCR software packages can turn it 
into text for you.

Brian Cluff

On 09/11/2012 02:20 PM, Michael Havens wrote:
> Well, the reason seems to be that 'document viewer is the default. I
> jusat d/l evince and can't seem to make it the default PDGF viewer. I
> right click on a pdf>open with>evince but it keeps opening with Document
> Viewer!
> :-)~MIKE~(-:
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 1:18 PM, Matt Graham <danceswithcrows at usa.net
> <mailto:danceswithcrows at usa.net>> wrote:
>
>      > Michael Havens wrote:
>      >> HOw can I make it so I can copy-n-paste the text from
>      >> a pdf into a oo document?
>     From: Mark Jarvis <m.jarvis at cox.net <mailto:m.jarvis at cox.net>>
>      > The Foxitpro PDF reader allows text to be marked and copied.
>      > Unfortunately, it's only available for Windows. I don't know if
>      > there's a Linux PDF reader that has that capability.
>
>     AFAICT, evince (the PDF reader that's standard for GNOME-based
>     distros) will
>     allow you to copy and paste text from PDFs as well.  Also remember
>     that some
>     PDF readers have multiple tools available, and the default tool might be
>     "scroll/drag pages" not "select text".
>
>     Also also remember that if the PDF doesn't actually contain text,
>     but is a
>     pile of images, then there will be no text to select.  The PDF that
>     you're
>     trying to look at doesn't have that problem, but for some reason,
>     evince won't
>     let you copy the text.  Acrobrat Reader will.  No, I don't know why
>     either....
>
>     --
>     Matt G / Dances With Crows
>     The Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress/
>     There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
>
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