Match the PDF symptom to the fix
| What you notice | What to check | What helps |
|---|---|---|
| A word looks correct but cannot be found | Soft hyphens or zero-width characters | Inspect the code-point report and remove unwanted characters. |
| Words move to the next line together | Non-breaking spaces | Normalize special spaces to ordinary spaces. |
| Every visual line becomes a paragraph | Hard line breaks from the source layout | Join lines manually after checking paragraph boundaries. |
| Sentences jump between two columns | PDF reading order | Copy smaller sections or export through your PDF reader. |
A soft hyphen example you can verify
The string co[U+00AD]operate contains a soft hyphen between “co” and “operate.” Depending on the viewer, it may be invisible or appear only at a line break. Removing that character produces cooperate. A normal visible hyphen in well-known is a different character and is not removed by the invisible-character pass.
The report names U+00AD before modifying it, so you can tell whether a soft hyphen was actually involved. If the document instead contains co- followed by a newline and operate, inspect and repair that break manually.
A reliable PDF copy-paste workflow
- Select one paragraph or column in your PDF reader and copy it. If the page is an image, use OCR in the reader first.
- Paste into the cleaner. This page selects Keep Typography, which skips smart-quote and dash replacement. Unicode compatibility normalization still runs, so review symbols and ligatures.
- Read the detection report and compare the output with the PDF. Pay special attention to numbers, citations, mathematical notation, and words at line endings.
- Fix remaining reading-order or hard-wrap issues, then copy the cleaned text into your document.
When character cleanup is not enough
Missing letters, duplicated headers, and mixed-up tables are often extraction problems. A text cleaner cannot recover text that never reached the clipboard or know which column a sentence belonged to. Return to the source file, copy a smaller selection, or use an export that preserves reading order.
If the reading order is correct but spacing is still wrong, compare the spacing troubleshooting guide with the non-breaking space guide. For background on the difference between document styling and character data, read why copied text pastes differently.