Copy text from Pdf app to Obsidian not formatting right

Help
1

So basically everytime i copy a text from any pdf editor (tried 3) to Obsidian, it inserts some line breaks.

If i copy something from web it works as expected.

Example of text:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries

Example what looks like when i copy and paste from pdf:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting

industry.

Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the

1500s

, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries

Is that a bug ? Thanks in Advance

2

PDF copy and paste can be very, shall we say, fiddly. To see if Obsidian is to blame, try pasting the same text from the PDF into Notepad/Textedit or similar. The ordering and position of text in the PDF document can be completely arbitrary if copied naively - it’s only when rendered onto a single “page” that the ordering and layout becomes apparent.

Not saying that’s what the problem is in this case, but worth trying in order to narrow down where the “bug” lies.

Also, see GitHub - akaalias/obsidian-extract-pdf: Extract PDFs to Markdown within Obsidian. And an ancient article on the issue of PDF layout surviving copy/paste: https://www.howtogeek.com/136698/how-can-i-copy-text-from-a-pdf-while-preserving-the-formatting/

3

Thanks for the answer my friend , i tried the default “notepad” app from windows and it work as expected, so i though would be obsidian , but i tried after you said another app here, the “WordPad” app from windows , and it worked like obsidian, with bad formatting. So its something with pdf Copy and Paste , looks like there is no reliable solution

1 Like
4

Have you tried doing Ctrl + Shift + V (or whatever is the key combination) for “Paste and Match style”?

Or possibly, right-click and choose Paste as plain text?

I use these from time to when the paste doesn’t look like I wanted to.

5

Yes bro, i tried to paste as plain text , but the result is the same.
Maybe the Pdfs i have was not well made

6

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