Is there a way to copy text out of a pdf without it starting a new paragraph at the end of each line of text?

April 11, 2010 7:02 PM

Is there a way to copy text out of a pdf and paste it into a word document without word starting a new paragraph at the end of each line of text?

I find that when I copy text out of a pdf and paste it into a word document, word treats the end of each line of text in the pdf as a new paragraph (as if you had hit the enter key). I know that I could use ctrl+f to replace new paragraphs with spaces, but is there an easier way to ensure that there won't be a new paragraph at the end of each line of text?

posted by AZNsupermarket to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

sometimes i copy text from a pdf to a plain text file and then copy that into word. it works like, 25% of the time but then usually i'll do a replace all, for whatever formatting snafoos came with the import.
posted by melodykramer at 7:29 PM on April 11, 2010

The basic answer is: no. There is no way to go from looking at a pdf in a pdf viewer to selecting text to pasting it without the paragraph breaks.

There is, however, a way to do this with larger documents all at once. Just

(1) download calibre, which converts ebooks across various formats;

(2) import and convert your pdf to a txt file;

(3) open your txt file in Word and copy/paste/whatever.
posted by koeselitz at 7:36 PM on April 11, 2010

If you have Acrobat, tagging the pdf will generally remove hard returns.
posted by ajr at 7:55 PM on April 11, 2010

Best answer: Another approach is to used Word's "AutoFormat" function on the pasted text once you have it in Word. Once AutoFormat runs, you'll probably have a block of text pretty close to what you need, and you can then apply your normal style/formatting in Word to get it the rest of the way.
posted by webhund at 10:41 PM on April 11, 2010