Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Hi all, I want to be able to 'select' words in a pdf document (opened via Draw) and then 'copy / paste' those words to word / write document. &/or ... do that 'convert recoginse text ... OSC ??? - or whatever it is called.

I have downloaded & installed the pdf extension. I have seen the 'toolbar' re quick edit text .. and tried it but it seems that when ever i try and 'do anything' on the opened pdf doc it just moves it around but I have also got the frame thingy over/ around the text but then couldn't do anything with it.

I have 'searched' for this and read help manuals etc. but obvioulsy I am missing something. Any help really appreciaited.
Thank you
Kathleen
(using version 3.3 on Windows 7)

You would perhaps be better to open your .pdf document in a dedicated pdf reader, such as Adobe Reader and select/copy your text there. At the same time, open your Word or Write document and paste your text into that.

The pdf extension for Draw is intended only to allow minor cosmetic changes be made to the pdf document, and does not offer the range of manipulation a dedicated pdf reader allows. Note that some pdf files can be "locked" by the original author to prevent copying text from them; ditto for printing. Fortunately these restrictions are rare, but they can exist.
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Edit: If you wish to extract much text from a pdf document, a better route to follow may be to use an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application to convert the entire document to plain text.

The latest version does support PDF import with a so called extention.
Just Google for PDF import for Apache OpenOffice. It does not mess with layout changes if you keep it into ODF format, it will stay nice. If you change it to MS Word, it can get messy.
You can try online tools for that like http://online-pdf.org