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Looking to understand how to copy text from one PDF to paste into a document? Or, maybe you want to copy text from one PDF and paste it into another PDF?
PDFs are versatile document formats because they preserve formatting settings across any device. However, they can sometimes be tricky to work with, requiring special programs or apps to manage, alter, or adjust them. Fortunately, PDF.Live makes it easy to copy text from PDFs using the PDF.Live editor.
In this article, we’ll show you how you can copy text from a PDF and paste it wherever you’d want. We’ll also show how to copy text from one PDF and paste it in a second PDF.
How to Copy Words From PDFs
- Drag and drop your PDF into the PDF.Live editor.
You can also navigate to where your PDF is located on your computer and drag it from the file explorer into PDF.Live.
- Under the Popular Editing Tools, select Edit Text.
- Highlight the text you want to copy by clicking and dragging over the text. Press the Ctrl and C keys on your keyboard.
This will copy the text to your computer’s clipboard. The clipboard is where your computer stores all of the text, images, and other information that you’ve copied at some point.
Did you know you can access your Windows 11 computer’s clipboard at any time by pressing the Windows and V keys on your keyboard?
How to Paste Text From a PDF
- Open a Word document or another PDF (this will also work with Google Docs). In this example, we’ll be pasting the text into another PDF using the PDF.Live editor. We’ve opened a new PDF the same way we did above.
- Select the area you want to paste your text in the PDF or document.
In a document, you can select anywhere to paste your text. If you’re using the PDF.Live editor you may need to select somewhere that text already exists. You can also select Add Text to add a new text box.
Clicking anywhere on the document with the Add Text tool will create a text box you can then paste your text into.
- Press the Ctrl and V keys.
If you want to check your clipboard history for all the different pieces of text that you’ve copied, remember that Win + V will let you access this on a Windows device.
In the above PDF, we’ve pasted the text from one PDF into a new text box in a second PDF. You’ll notice that the formatting settings of the text weren’t preserved between PDFs. For documents, this may work the same way, depending on your version of Microsoft Word or whatever application you’re working with.
The text you paste will likely use the font and formatting settings of the document that you’ve pasted it in — unless you select to paste unformatted text. When you select Unformatted Text, this can be a little confusing … because it’s not, technically, unformatted; what this really means is you want to paste the text to match the destination document’s formatting, rather than bring over the source document’s formatting.
Here’s how that works:
- Microsoft Word: Right click and select Paste Special >> Unformatted Text. You can also use ctrl + shift + V to paste and match the destination document’s formatting. You’ll also find paste options in Word’s menu: Edit >> Paste special… or Paste and Match Formatting.
- Google Docs: Right click and select Paste without formatting (or ctrl + shift + v).
PDF Copy and Paste Troubleshooting
As you work with PDFs, you may notice that some text in certain PDFs won’t allow you to copy with your PDF reader. In fact, no software seems able to recognize the text.
Here is an example of a document that has text that can’t be copied.
This is likely because you’re working with a scanned PDF. A scanned PDF is more similar to a picture than a PDF, as your document scanner essentially takes high-quality photos of a document for electronic usage. To understand why this happens, see our article on optical character recognition.
The text in a scanned document is tricky to copy. You’ll need to find an image-to-text converter that combs through an image and extracts all the text that’s found. By searching “image to text converter” you’ll find a few tools that will let you do this. These tools may not be 100% accurate but are much simpler than re-typing every line of text from a document that you’ve scanned.