Copying text from a protected pdf file

[Paul Smith]

On 9/15/05, Leonard Isham <leonard.isham at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > I have got a pdf file, whose text I would like to copy to a word
> > > > processor. However, it seems to be protected, as when I copy and paste
> > > > a piece of text from there into a word processor, I only see garbage.
> > > > Is there some way of getting clean text from the pdf file?
> > >
> > > Try "printing" it to another unprotected PDF file and do the copy and
> > > paste from there. YMMV
> >
> > Thanks, Leonard. Do you mean that I should try to print to a ps file
> > and then converting the output to a pdf file? I do not quite
> > understand what you mean by «Try "printing" it to another unprotected
> > PDF».
> 
> The exact process depends on what you ahve available.  Except for
> servers I'm stuck in Windows and use a PDF Printdriver to print
> anything to a PDF.

Thanks, Leonard. I have just checked: the pdf file is not copy
protected, but, even so, what I can copy into a word processor is
garbage. It may be something relating with encodings.

Paul