Copy and paste-unrecognized font

[johnjohn320]

Long story short, I'm trying to copy and paste a large body of text from a pdf. However, the text is in another language, and my computer won't seem to recognize certain aspects of the font. Every time it has one of their accents (like a é for example), it pastes as random character garbage.

Any suggestions? Thanks guys!

 

[lxskllr]

Maybe select a font with more features? Not all fonts have extended sets.

 

[postmortemIA]

in acrobat, pdf file's properties will tell you encoding and font used.

 

[piasabird]

Copy as an image.

Maybe PDF can change the text to something your computer can use or maybe you can go to the Microsoft website and see if there are fonts or languages you can download or something like that. A lot depends on which version of Windows you are using some versions can download additional languages.

If you have Microsoft Word or office suite maybe you have more fonts on the disk or can download more.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/212318

Microsoft is a competing product with PDF so they will probably not be much help. However there may be some third party tools that will help.

 

[johnjohn320]

I am using Microsoft Word-I've downloaded the fonts from the language that the pdf is in, but it still pastes with the same garbage in place of the accents.

 

[lxskllr]

If it isn't sensitive material, I could try it.

 

[johnjohn320]

Any other ideas? lxskllr and I have both tried extensively and failed (thanks again to him for his efforts!). New fonts, lots of programs/tools, nothing seems to be working...

 

[Mushkins]

Any other ideas? lxskllr and I have both tried extensively and failed (thanks again to him for his efforts!). New fonts, lots of programs/tools, nothing seems to be working...

I have this happen with Japanese and korean a lot, especially under XP (Win7/8 have much better multilingual font support caked in). You just get a bunch of rectangles and gibberish characters even with language packs installed.

The fix is usually to set the actual system language to the language in question, which requires a restart to change. For most languages the windows interface is still mostly in english, but the font will look wonky. This is typically how to get non-unicode applications to install/run properly as well, it's kind of a pain in the ass. I typically just keep some VMs in the background with the system set to whatever language i'm working with when doing multilingual stuff, it's easier than constantly restarting your system to go back/forth.

In Win7. Control Panel > Regions and Languages > Administrative Tab > Change System Locale.