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+--- Thread: Copy and paste problems (djvu, pdf) (/thread-5613.html)
Copy and paste problems (djvu, pdf) - mygbmygb - 2010-05-11
I have some PDF and DJVU files with Japanese in them. It is possible to select the Japanese sentences and copy them but when I paste them into Anki or notepad they turn out like "Itf^^ 61so" or "234 -
. 05" etc..
I wonder because for some of the pdf and djvu files I have the copy and paste process of Japanese works fine, but with many of them it does what I mentioned above. Is there any way to fix this?
Copy and paste problems (djvu, pdf) - xaarg - 2010-05-11
Quick answer: No.
Most DJVU files are just scans. The text has been created using OCR software. If this software did not support Japanese, then obviously all the text is just gibberish. You normally can't see this, because DJVU files can show an image layer with the original image of the scan on top of the text layer.
PDF files can contain the text as a sequence pointers into an array of glyphs extracted from some font. As such the PDF file no longer contains information about which symbol was meant originally, if such information have not been embedded into the file. Some older programs did not include such information in the PDF file.
I guess the easiest way to get at you text would be by taking a screenshot of the text you want, feeding it into a Japanese-capable OCR software and fixing the inevitable errors.