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Text copied from pdf in preview is in "blocks"

I was trying to copy a text in this pdf document in Preview but it's highlighted as "blocks", when I pasted it, it gives out gibberish. I tried to search for it but couldn't get the name/keyword of this problem correctly

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Posted on Oct 15, 2023 8:42 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 15, 2023 9:37 AM

If this PDF was scanned, it is simply a PDF wrapper around an image of that text, and you cannot select the text until the PDF has had optical character recognition (OCR) applied to it. That would overlay every character in the image with its text counter part, and the latter layer can be selected and pasted elsewhere.


Apple's Preview does not have an OCR feature. PDF Editors normally have an OCR feature though this is likely disabled in trial versions of those applications, or if not, accompanied by a watermark.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 15, 2023 9:37 AM in response to JohnWitWickey

If this PDF was scanned, it is simply a PDF wrapper around an image of that text, and you cannot select the text until the PDF has had optical character recognition (OCR) applied to it. That would overlay every character in the image with its text counter part, and the latter layer can be selected and pasted elsewhere.


Apple's Preview does not have an OCR feature. PDF Editors normally have an OCR feature though this is likely disabled in trial versions of those applications, or if not, accompanied by a watermark.

Text copied from pdf in preview is in "blocks"

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