How come sometimes pdf opens in gibberish

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    • Copy text in pdf gives me gibberish. Is there a wa.
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    Copy text in pdf gives me gibberish. Is there a way to OCR to correct? Enthusiast ,

    /t5/acrobat-discussions/copy-text-in-pdf-gives-me-gibberish-is-there-a-way-to-ocr-to-correct/td-p/3720676 Sep 25, 2011 Sep 25, 2011

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    I have a few documents that are complete gibberish when I select text and copy. If I open them in Acrobat Pro, select text, Copy, and "Show Clipboard" in Finder, I see a bunch of "skull characters", and if I open them in Preview and do the same, I see strings of dots. The text in the clipboard cannot be pasted intelligibly into any other program, and I cannot search the document.

    Some of these documents were downloaded from commercial sites. One of them came from (I think) OCR'ing a scanned document using ClearScan. An example of such a document is at https://public.me.com/ix/alanterra/Reynoso%202006%20p%201.pdf?disposition=download+1317001233647 (it's small, 55K).

    It seems to me that one way to do this would be to convert the document into a "scanned" pdf, and then OCR it. But the only way I can figure out how to do this is to image each page separately in Photoshop, and then assemble the pages into a new document.

    There must be a way to deal with this problem.

    PS--If you look at the document linked to above, you will note that the text in the footer is coherent, but not the text in the body of the document.