I need help with copying text from a PDF and pasting it into another application. Whenever I do this, the text's format retains all the line breaks as they appear in the PDF, which makes it really frustrating. It feels like I'm doing a tedious task where I have to manually adjust every line to make it readable: going to the start of each line, deleting a character, and then inserting a space. This is so labor-intensive, especially with long documents! I've tried various text editors and office applications, but nothing seems to work. Although I've seen some programmatic solutions, I find them a bit excessive for such a simple issue. Surely, there must be an easier way to handle this without using scripts?
2 Answers
One option is to use an editor that supports search and replace. You can try finding the specific line breaks and replacing them with spaces. Here's a quick method: Search for the line break symbols and replace them temporarily with something like '|||' which you can later replace with paragraph breaks after you've adjusted the other lines. Just ensure your paragraph breaks are clearly defined!
Converting your PDF to plaintext is probably the best approach. It can feel like a hassle, but if you use a PDF reader like Okular, you can export your PDF as plain text and then copy it from there. Depending on the amount of text, that might save you a lot of formatting headaches!
I gave that a shot in Ubuntu's text editor, and it unfortunately kept the column format. Not ideal if you're dealing with structured text.