Word (2004) and Apple Preview don't seem to work well together

[dfritzin]

Has anyone else seen this problem? I highlighted a table in a journal
article in Preview, copied it and pasted it into a Word document. The
result was a solid black box. If I take this same article (a pdf file,
btw) and do the identical thing in Acrobat, it pastes in fine. If I go
back to Preview and copy the same table and try to paste it into a
Pages (2006) document, it works fine. Finally (and this may be
related), if I take the same file in preview and try to paste the same
table into CanvasX (build 925), I get the black box.

PM G5/Dual 2.0 (revA), 1 Gig Ram, OSX.4.6, with all updates, etc for
both Word and the OS.

Any ideas as to what is going on, and how I can get actual pasteing
from Preview into Word?

Thanks in advance,

 

[Elliott Roper]

Has anyone else seen this problem? I highlighted a table in a journal
article in Preview, copied it and pasted it into a Word document. The
result was a solid black box. If I take this same article (a pdf file,
btw) and do the identical thing in Acrobat, it pastes in fine. If I go
back to Preview and copy the same table and try to paste it into a
Pages (2006) document, it works fine. Finally (and this may be
related), if I take the same file in preview and try to paste the same
table into CanvasX (build 925), I get the black box.

PM G5/Dual 2.0 (revA), 1 Gig Ram, OSX.4.6, with all updates, etc for
both Word and the OS.

Any ideas as to what is going on, and how I can get actual pasteing
from Preview into Word?

You are lucky it works that well. PDFs carry no guarantee of
copy-pasteability. Especially a table. There is no reason why the
characters cannot be sprayed into a PDF in any random order.
Just because elements are near one another on the page when presented
implies nothing about their order in a file. Try copying double column
text from a PDF and pasting that into Word or anything else for that
matter.

The most reliable way of copying text from PDFs if you can't get the
originals they were created from is to OCR the little snivellers.

You might find some software that does it all in one step and is
cheaper than the full version of Acrobat professional, which sort-of
OCRs it, but I never have.

I'd be interested in discovering how you got Pages to deal with it.
What happens if you then copy from Pages and paste into Word?

Word will rasterize a PDF as quick as you can look at it. Printing Word
as PDF is excellent (sometimes you may need the print as Postscript
detour) Going the other way is hopeless.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Try experimenting with the Edit | Paste Special possibilities to paste.

Different applications put different information on the clipboard when you
copy, and I think also some applications can put multiple versions of
something on a clipboard, and which one gets grabbed by default depends on
some arcane code.

That Word is set to read whatever format Acrobat puts on a clipboard, and
that Pages is set to read whatever format Preview puts on a clipboard, kinda
makes sense. (People have run into similar issues copying and pasting images
from Safari, I think, and I think Apple actually changed the type of
information put on the clipboard from Safari 1 to Safari 2. Apparently in
Illustrator/InDesign/FreeHand you can configure what format gets put on the
clipboard by default.)

What happens if you then paste it from Pages to Word? Is that a workaround?

 

[dfritzin]

You are lucky it works that well. PDFs carry no guarantee of
copy-pasteability. Especially a table. There is no reason why the
characters cannot be sprayed into a PDF in any random order.
Just because elements are near one another on the page when presented
implies nothing about their order in a file. Try copying double column
text from a PDF and pasting that into Word or anything else for that
matter.

The most reliable way of copying text from PDFs if you can't get the
originals they were created from is to OCR the little snivellers.

You might find some software that does it all in one step and is
cheaper than the full version of Acrobat professional, which sort-of
OCRs it, but I never have.

I'd be interested in discovering how you got Pages to deal with it.
What happens if you then copy from Pages and paste into Word?

I just opened Pages '06. Then I copied the table out of the pdf
document using the select tool (the crosshair, not the text select
tool). and pasted into Pages. It showed up perfectly. I didn't try to
copy/paste that back into Word, however. I could try that Monday. Right
now, I 'm using my Home machine, and don't have the article available.

Thanks to all for your suggestions.
[snip]

 

[Elliott Roper]

Elliott Roper wrote:

I just opened Pages '06. Then I copied the table out of the pdf
document using the select tool (the crosshair, not the text select
tool). and pasted into Pages. It showed up perfectly. I didn't try to
copy/paste that back into Word, however. I could try that Monday. Right
now, I 'm using my Home machine, and don't have the article available.

Ah, then you are in for shock. It is a picture of your text and won't
be editable. It's the paste into Word you are going to do tomorrow that
will be the interesting one. Will it be black on black?

 

[dfritzin]

Ah, then you are in for shock. It is a picture of your text and won't
be editable. It's the paste into Word you are going to do tomorrow that
will be the interesting one. Will it be black on black?

Actually, I don't expect that it will be editable, and I knew it was a
picture. I'll be interested to see how it pastes from pages into Word.