In Acrobat, a quick look at the PDF’s Document Properties dialog box (File > Properties, or Command/Control-D) told me that the PDF was not tagged. How could I tell if my client’s PDF was tagged or not?
The answer is to make sure the PDF is “tagged” (made accessible to people with screen readers) before you copy text from it. Luckily, sometime in the recent past - don’t remember how or when - I picked up a nugget of information that allowed me to quickly fix the problem in Acrobat so that the pasted text came in properly (this one example and the others from the PDF), like so: Obviously it’d be quick work to clean up those six lines in InDesign, but this was only the first of many different text selections I’d need to copy/paste from the PDF. You can download the PDFs from their Online Archives page.) They’re from the Chicago Creative Coalition newsletter, a wonderful organization. (To protect my client’s privacy, I’m using a different PDF for these screen shots.
#COPYING FROM PDF TO WORD WITH FORMATTING PRO#
On the left, the selected text in Acrobat Pro 8, on the right, the pasted result in InDesign: Of course, I was in a hurry, and of course, the copy came in with a hard return at the end of every line. The other day I needed to copy a paragraph of text from a client-supplied PDF into an InDesign layout.