How to copy text from a PDF when you cannot select it
Try selecting one line in the middle of the page and pasting it into a plain text editor. If the words arrive in the right order, use that copy. If you can select only the whole page as a picture, you may be looking at a scan. Test the passage you need: a PDF can contain both selectable text and scanned pages.
Capture the passage as an image
- Open the page and zoom in until the letters are easy to read. Keep the line endings visible.
- Capture the passage as a screenshot and save it as PNG. For a page with two columns, capture one column at a time so unrelated lines do not get mixed.
- Open Istio’s image-to-text tool. Upload the image, not the PDF. Select the language of the passage and start recognition.
Check a line before copying the result
Imagine a delivery note that reads Box B08 — 16 units. If the output reads “Box BO8 — 16 units”, the quantity is intact but the box code is wrong: the zero became the letter O. Compare identifiers and quantities with the scan before pasting the text into your document.
If the page still does not copy cleanly
If selected text pastes as scrambled characters, you can use the same image method for that passage. If copying is restricted by the document owner, request an accessible copy. If OCR misses line endings, capture a slightly wider area and check it against the original. For a table, verify each value against its row label; plain text does not preserve the grid. See how to troubleshoot OCR errors if letters keep disappearing.