RE: PDF saved to gibberish

[<Brian -dot- Henderson -at- mitchell1 -dot- com>]

I am constantly extracting text from PDFs, and I never been able to
figure out why in some docs the text is ASCII and in some it's binary
code. I rarely have knowledge of how most of the documents were created
so I haven't spent much effort trying to figure it out.

Usually, I just OCR the doc and that solves the problem.

-BrianH.

-----Original Message----- From: Nancy Allison

Hi, all.

I have tried two ways to save the text of a PDF to .txt and both
attempts produced a weird, symbol-font type gibberish. 

This is what it looks like once it's pasted into Plain Text:  
 .
In the .txt file, it shows lots of male and female symbols, exclamation
points, musical notes, and geometric figures. 

I used the Acrobat Save as Text command, and also selected all the text
and pasted it into a .txt file. Same result both times.

I selected the gibberish and assigned different fonts to it; the
gibberish showed up in the selected fonts. It seems as the text has been
assigned to a different character set.

The PDF document properties show a Security Method of "No Security, "
Document Assembly, Comenting, Signing, and Creation of Template Pages
are Not Allowed.

Everything else, including Content Copying, is allowed. 

Any ideas as to what's going on, and how I can successfully extract the
text?

Thanks!

--Nancy

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