I have a Scrivener project with a large number of .pdf files stored. When I try to copy and paste text from a pdf file into a draft text file I see this gibberish of close parentheses:
No)matter)who)the)presidentQelect)may)be,)electors)are)not)in)the)least)equipped)to)be a)“deliberative)body”)as)the)letter)from)the)10)electors)claim)it)is,)citing)the)newly)chic name)of)Alexander)Hamilton.
This is deal breaker for me using this product. Why is this happening and can I fix it?
Have you tried copying from these PDFs in other viewers? I’m almost certain the problem is with your PDFs, not Scrivener (which technically isn’t even Scrivener, but the stock macOS PDF viewer running in our window). This looks like classic old-school copy protection to me, where the text is littered with invisible garbage characters in between the visible characters.
Not ideal, but you could tidy that up by searching for ) and replacing with a space.
Capital Q with a hyphen.
Line break with a space.
All the pdfs in question were produced using the print dialog box, save as pdf option.
This problem only occurs in Scrivener, no other apps, so cleaning the files after pasting is not only inelegant, it should not be necessary at all.
One app without this problem is DEVONthink and it looks like that’s where I will migrate.
Thanks for the responses.
Glad that you’ve found a solution.
Just curious…if you have the text to print to PDF in the first place, why not just store/copy from the original text (and eschew PDFs entirely)?
Festive wishes & happy writing.
Do you have a sequence of steps you can provide that would show me how to get this result, if it is using system tools to produce it? I copied the text of one of your posts into a blank Scrivener project, printed the document with Cmd-P, saved the print job as PDF, dragged the PDF into the Research folder of that same project, copied the text again and pasted over the original with no differences in the text.