Search not working with some PDFs

Questions related to converting various types of documents
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nikhiljain
Posts:4
Joined:Tue May 19, 2009 9:01 am
Search not working with some PDFs

Post by nikhiljain » Fri Mar 19, 2010 7:33 am

Hi,

For some of our PDF documents in the converted Print2Flash SWF file Search Functionality is not working, we get “Not Found” message when we try to search.
One more observation if we do copy text from the SWF file we get some garbled text.

Looks like Adobe Reader while printing sends Texts as image. What can be resolution for this?

drumax
Posts:5
Joined:Thu Nov 17, 2011 8:37 am

Re: Search not working with some PDFs

Post by drumax » Thu Nov 17, 2011 4:38 pm

This is the same for me. Search function doesnt work and any text copy comes out as boxes (no actual text) (see below)



This makes these features quite useless.

It would be great to solve this however my current project does not require search and copy...if it did I would certainly want to find out the problem...it would be good to find a resolution for the future or an explination. The PDF I created the print2flash file from is not locked and has text that can be highlighted and searched.

staff
Posts:267
Joined:Sat Dec 15, 2007 4:48 pm

Re: Search not working with some PDFs

Post by staff » Fri Nov 18, 2011 12:06 am

This is a known problem for Adobe Reader. The fact is it may sometimes send text to printers as images or with invalid character codes. As a result Print2Flash cannot extract valid text and text copy and search functions cannot work.The text in PDF may be represented as text and can be selected, found or copied in the Adobe Reader but when it is sent to printers, it is sent in this way.

The fact is printing feature in Adobe Reader is oriented towards printing on real printers and getting a hard copy of documents. As it does not matter whether text is represented with images or with invalid character codes when it is printed on paper, Adobe Reader seems not to be over-scrupulous to represent text as text when sending it to printers. This problem is known to happen for some of PDF documents containing custom encoding fonts or Type 1 fonts. You may need either to use TrueType fonts in PDF documents or find another software for printing of PDF documents besides Adobe Reader.

If you obtained the PDF document from another document type, e.g. from MS Word, it is better to convert the original document rather than PDF. As we have said, this issue is known to happen only with Adobe Reader so direct conversion should resolve this problem.

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