FG
💻 Software

PDF has garbled text when copy pasting

Fresh7 days ago
Mar 15, 2026208465 views
Confidence Score0%
0%

Problem

I'm trying to copy and paste text from a PDF file. However, whenever I paste the original text it is a huge mess of garbled characters. The text looks like the following (this is just one small extract): I've tried it in both Adobe and Foxit PDF readers. I did a 'Save as text' in Adobe Reader and t…

Error Output

4$/)5=$13! ,4&1*%-! )5'$! 1$2$)&,$40! 65))! .*5)1! -#$! )/'8*/8$03! 
(4/+$6&4;0!/'1!-&&)0!*0$1!.9!/,,)5%/-5&'!1$2$)&,$403!5'!+*%#!-#$! 
0/+$!6/9! -#/…

Unverified for your environment

Select your OS to check compatibility.

1 Fix

Canonical Fix
Unverified Fix
New Fix – Awaiting Verification

Fix for: PDF has garbled text when copy pasting

Low Risk

Simplest way to get around this is to open the file in a recent version of Google Chrome with built-in PDF reading plugin. Then you can use Chrome's search feature to find text, and copy-paste works correctly. I would like to vote up pipitas's comme…

Awaiting Verification

Be the first to verify this fix

Sign in to verify this fix

Environment