Cannot seem to selct, cut, copy or paste in document

[KarlwithaK]

Ok, First, I admit I am a bit of a digital dinosaur, so forgive that, first.
My employer supplied us with PDF-XChange probably as a low cost alternative to Adobe Standard or Pro.

I have many documents that I have only as PDF that I need to work on. Some may have originated as WORD and were saved as PDF but I have no access to the native file. (Word, sometimes PowerPoint, often Excel)

I have one up on my second screen now. Here is what I see. I want to select copy and paste text from the PDF into a Word document, maybe into a chart cell or into Excel, into a cell, or even into another PDF document I am constructing in PDF-XChange.
I select the Select Text Tool. I place the cursor near where I want to select text. (the cursor is now a "cross-hair" ) If I left-click, I can draw a blue box around whole blocks of text, but when I release the left button, the box disappears and nothing is selected. Right click does nothing but bring up floating menu similar to toolbar. Nothing I do with this Select Text Tool actually selects any text.
So... I try the "Edit Content Tool". I select the tool, and the cursor, when I bring it over areas of the document where text is located, turns to a tiny black arrowhead. If I left click I get a heavy blue box with handles to stretch, rotate and move but it does not select any text. Generally it scrambles to text so badly that I must undo several times to back out.
"Add Text" is the next tool. I can left click to bet a text box that superimposes over existing text but will not remove it select it or cover it. All it will do is type OVER the existing text and make both unreadable.
"Edit Form" is reserved I believe for form-fillable PDFs, and Typewriter, similar to "Edit Content Tool" and types over the top of the existing text.
So.... What am I doing wrong? I cannot believe that these tools are behaving this way considering what the tools are named. Is there some sort of protection on the documents that I cannot see? Why can I not just select and copy a line of two of text, copy and paste it where I want?

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello KarlwithaK,

The most likely case is that this document was originally a scanned document, and the "content" you are selecting is an image, or a "mask"(a type of semi transparent image, for simplicity sake). The text in these cannot be directly edited within the Editor and will likely need to be recreated from scratch. Now this is of course only my assumption from how you have described the issue, If you could send us the document we can check and verify that for you.
You can either upload the PDF document here by dragging it into the text window while typing your reply, or if it contain sensitive information, you can email us directly support@pdf-xchange.com.com

Best Regards,

[KarlwithaK]

Here is a document that behaves as I described. (attached below)
If it was scanned as you suggest, is there a way to tell by "looking" at it? Is it the way all the tools draw boxes instead of selecting lines of text?
Is there a way to run the document through an Optical Character Reader (OCR) to get a txt file I can copy/paste from?

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello Karl,

Looking over the document, It certainly does consist entirely of images, but does not look like any scanned document I have encountered. It seems more like an application performed some sort of "Image optimization" on it to convert all the content into the most efficient size and shapes of images to save space.
There is no one set way to know every time if a document is scanned, however, usually after a scan you can see a bit of a border, or Gradient in the background, depending on the scanner. Another surefire method is if a document page is one single image (or an image plus a mask layer) from top to bottom, it is almost certainly a scanned page.

It would be possible to OCR the document, thankfully the text is very legible and there are no blemishes in the document to interfere, so searching it like that would work well.
Note that currently our OCR function generated an invisible text layer on top of the current page content. Meaning that you would need to manually change all the text color to black, and then remove the images. It should also be noted that some of the pages in this document contain text that is rotated, which OCR does not handle well, for those pages it is very likely that the text will need to be manually migrated, or you will need to rotate the page and perform OCR on it once more.
This Article should help you to convert the document to base editable base text after OCR: https://www.pdf-xchange.com/knowle ... -performed

I hope this helps!

[Charlie 1]

I can copy and paste in a document -and save it- but it does not show up in the document when printing.
Charlie 1

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello Charlie,
Likely you have changed the Editors print settings to only print the document, not annotations such as stamps. You can change this by pressing Ctrl+P and then using the dropdown at the bottom of the window:

DMKB18December881.png

If that does not solve the issue, please send us a copy of the document for testing.

Regards,