Can't use Select Tool with .pdf created by PDF Xchange Lite

[cyberqueen]

I have used PDF Xchange Viewer for quite a while. Today, I downloaded and installed PDF Xchange Lite, which is free for non-commercial home use. I used this as my printer to print an article from the Washington Post as a pdf file. I then opened the pdf file and tried to use PDF Xchange Viewer's Select Tool to select certain parts of the text to save them to the clipboard. But the Select Tool didn't work. I've used the Select Tool many times on other .pdf files, but never one that I printed to pdf with PDF Xchange Lite. Is there some reason that I can't use the select tool with documents "printed to pdf" with this software? Does Tracker software offer any alternatives that will do what I want? I should add that I'm using the most recent version of the Tracker software on Windows 7 64-bit.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

HI cyberqueen,

whether the text is selectable or not depends on how the Web Browser sends the print job. Firefox for example can use graphic acceleration that results in pages without selectable test. (The text is sent as curves not characters).
https://www.pdf-xchange.com/knowled ... -Firefox-4

Can you tell us which Browser you are using and pass a URL we can test?

[cyberqueen]

Thanks, Paul, for your quick response. The browser I'm using is Firefox 16.0.2. I went to the Washington Post website at http://www.washingtonpost.com/regional and clicked on Today's Paper (at the very top, more or less in the center). That brought me to http://thewashingtonpost.newspaperdirec ... iewer.aspx . Though I chose a different article, to make this easy let's say I chose one on the front page entitled "In Burma, a long-sought message of hope, change." I indicated that I wanted to print that article (there were several icons that appeared, one of which was print). Eventually, I was able to specify the printer, and I chose PDF-XChange Printer Lite 2012. It successfully created the pdf, but when I opened it, PDF-XChange Viewer's Select Tool didn't work.

I hope this gives you the information you need. (BTW, in this forum message, I tried to make the URLs live links, but I was told "You cannot use certain BBCodes: [url]").

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi cyberqueen,

Yes the [url] tag is disabled indeed.
Did you check the KB article Paul posted above?
https://www.pdf-xchange.com/knowledgebase/307
It explains how you can turn off the said hardware acceleration in FF so that your printed text is properly selectable in the created PDF document.

Best,
Stefan

[cyberqueen]

Thanks, Stefan, for your response. Unfortunately, turning graphics acceleration off and restarting Firefox made no difference. After doing that, I again tried to capture an article from the same source (Washington Post's "Today's Paper"), and the Select Tool still doesn't work. It does work on other .pdf files that I have on my computer, but not on the ones I've tried to make using PDF-XChange Lite from the Washington Post.

[John - Tracker Supp]

Hi,

I looked at :

http://thewashingtonpost.newspaperdirec ... iewer.aspx

and the content being displayed is an image - not text - so when you print, the image is converted as an image based PDF - the only way to then make it text selectable/searchable is to use the FREE PDF-XChange Viewer to 'OCR' the content - which adds a text selectable/searchable layer.

I suspect the WP are doing this 'intentionally' to thwart the content being copied easily.

Hope that helps

[John - Tracker Supp]

PS...

If you follow the links available to individual articles - they are actually text based (whereas the full pages appear not to be) and I converted without issue to a text PDF for those items with PDFX-Lite ...

[cyberqueen]

Thanks, John. I started this thread when I was unable to find a link to an article from which I wanted to copy sections. The only place I could find the article was by looking in "Today's Paper." I was able to print the selected article to pdf using PDF-XChange Lite, and I had assumed that I'd then be able to use PDF-Xchange Viewer's Select Tool to copy to the clipboard just the parts I wanted. That turned out not to be the case, and I gather from what you've said that everything in "Today's Paper" is reproduced as an image and thus not able to be printed to pdf in a way that would permit the Select Tool to work.

As you have also said (and I already knew), much of the Washington Post is available in a text-based format. For such articles, I don't need to print them to pdf, since the only reason I wanted to do that was to be able to take advantage of the Select Tool. But for articles that appear in a text-based format, I can simply do what I usually do: highlight the text I want on the screen and use CTL-C to copy the passage(s) to the clipboard.

I'm not quite sure why the Washington Post has created "Today's Paper," but I very much appreciate all the information I've received here from Paul, Stefan, and you (John) about what PDF-XChange Lite can and cannot do.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Hi again cyberqueen,

I think you have summed up the situation pretty well, except one thing...

John made mention of the OCR feature of our Viewer (both licensed and free). This is what you want I believe.

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and it's purpose is exactly what you have described, to add selectable text to an otherwise not selectable files. It literally looks at the image and scans for similarities to a library of known characters. It will put an invisible text layer over the image so that dragging the select tool over the image of the text will, post OCR, actually select the text and you can copy it.

hth

[cyberqueen]

John made mention of the OCR feature of our Viewer (both licensed and free). This is what you want I believe.

Paul, thanks VERY much for calling my attention to what John said about OCR. I guess I misread his message when I read it earlier. I've now tried the OCR feature on one of the articles on which I couldn't use the Select Tool before, and it works beautifully! You're right--this is exactly what I was looking for.

Again, many thanks!

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Thanks for the kind words cyberqueen,

And happy to hear that our OCR feature works well for you!

Cheers,
Stefan