Can’t copy text from a PDF on Mac? Why, and how to fix it

You drag across a paragraph in a PDF and nothing highlights. Or the text highlights, but ⌘C does nothing, or the paste comes out as a jumble of symbols. Each of those has a different cause, and once you know which one you’re dealing with, the fix usually takes a minute.

First, find out what kind of PDF you have

A PDF can hold real text, pictures of text, or both on the same page. What happens when you try to select tells you which.

If your text pastes as symbols, why PDF text pastes as gibberish explains the font problem in more depth.

Fix 1: switch on Text Selection in Preview

This is Apple’s first suggestion, and it’s easy to miss. If you last used Preview to draw a rectangle or sign a form, a different tool may still be active.

1. Choose Tools → Text Selection, or click Show Markup Toolbar and then the Text Selection button.
2. Drag across the text you want.
3. Press ⌘C.

If the text now highlights, you’re done. If it still doesn’t, the page is almost certainly a picture.

Fix 2: let Preview recognize a scanned PDF

Preview can recognize the text in an image-based PDF and add it to the file as an invisible layer, so you can select, search and copy it in any PDF app.

1. Open the PDF in Preview and choose File → Export.
2. Select Embed Text.
3. Give the copy a new name, so the original stays as it was, and click Save.
4. Open the new file and select the text as usual.

The Embed Text option only appears when the document has no recognized text yet. Recognition can still misread faint or skewed scans, so check names and numbers against the page. For a long document, our guide to copying text from a scanned PDF goes further.

Fix 3: screenshot one passage, then use Live Text

When you only need a paragraph, a figure caption or a label inside a chart, a screenshot is quicker than exporting the whole file.

1. Zoom in on the passage (⌘+) so the letters are large on screen.
2. Press ⌃⇧⌘4 and drag over it. The screenshot goes to the clipboard.
3. In Preview, choose File → New from Clipboard, drag across the text and press ⌘C.

This also gets around fonts that paste as gibberish, because Live Text reads the shapes on screen rather than the broken character data in the file.

Fix 4: read the page with Unpixel

In Unpixel

Unpixel reads text from the pixels on screen, so it doesn’t matter whether the PDF has a text layer or which app is showing it.

• One passage: press ⇧⌘2 in Preview, a browser or a document portal, drag over the text and let go. It’s on your clipboard.
• The whole file: click the menu bar icon, then Open Image…, and pick the PDF, or drop the PDF on the icon. Unpixel reads up to 50 pages, in order, with a blank line between pages.

For clean paragraphs, turn off Keep line breaks in Settings → Recognition. Unpixel then joins the lines of each paragraph and re-joins words that were hyphenated across a line break. List items keep their own lines. A table on the page pastes into Numbers or Excel as cells. The PDF itself is never changed.

More on tidying pasted text is in removing line breaks from text copied from a PDF.

When the PDF is locked

If the PDF needs a password before you can select or copy text, the person who made the file chose to restrict copying, and Preview respects that choice. To check, choose Tools → Show Inspector and click the Encryption button. If you have the password, enter it there.

The straightforward fixes are to ask the sender for the password or an unrestricted copy, or to find the original document. A PDF that needs a password just to open can’t be read at all without it. Our guide to protected PDFs explains the different locks and what you can fairly do with the text.