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I have this pdf file which I use okular to read;the pdf file can be opened and I can read it normally. However when I try to select the text using the selection tool; the menu pops up the selected text comes up as gibberish (like rectangles, and greek letters). And it goes without saying that I can't search within the document either. I've also tried other pdf viewers like the one on Firefox and the document viewer.

Mayu
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    Can you also try copying using the canonical PDF reader, Acrobat? If that cannot do it either, then the text has not been encoded properly for text extraction. – Jongware Jan 27 '14 at 20:49
  • I have but when I copy a line and paste it, there is the same problem. I'm assuming by the canonical PDF reader you mean "document viewer" – Mayu Jan 27 '14 at 22:37
  • The funny thing is (at least to me) when I copy the text and paste it in the search function it actually does a good job searching. – Mayu Jan 27 '14 at 22:49
  • Acrobat is "the" default viewer; it is the touchstone for **all** 3rd party viewers. Therefore .. if Acrobat can't, most likely no-one can. But of course there is 'text' in your document and you can search for this. It just does not use any useful (=human-readable) encoding. – Jongware Jan 27 '14 at 23:27
  • possible duplicate of [PDF copy paste gives garbage text](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12184304/pdf-copy-paste-gives-garbage-text) – Martin Schröder Jan 28 '14 at 11:21
  • @Jongware: He's using Linux, and Adobe Reader on Linux is not supported anymore. – Martin Schröder Jan 28 '14 at 11:21
  • I actually downloaded the pdf file, the uploader said it was OCR'd I guess it wasn't done properly. I also tried opening from acrobat reader on a windows machine, and still came up with the same problem. I guess I'll try opening it on gimp and making a pdf full of images and try to OCR it. I'll keep you guys updated, but for now thank you all for your time I appreciate it. – Mayu Jan 28 '14 at 23:28

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