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Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,4 System Version: macOS 10.15.2 (19C57)

I have a document that I scanned with ABBYY FineReader (OCR). I need to copy some sentences/use text to speech on the doc. In preview, however, many of the words are mashing together (the spaces are being removed. Thus:

"This statement introduces highly complex feature Romans. On the one hand, Paul is insistent"

becomes:

"ThisstatementintroducesahighlycomplexfeatureofRomans. Ontheonehand,Paulisinsistent"

Now, it's very possible that that is how the metadata is normally read. For example, Skim also has the same problem. On the other hand, Adobe Acrobat Reader is including the spaces. Chrome also functions the way that Adobe does. The problem is that I don't know why preview is functioning the way it is.

My question(s) are the following (any of which will satisfy me):

  • why is this happening? Does Preview process text differently (or does Adobe have some kind of spell check)
  • is there a way to fix this (either by getting the metadata from adobe into preview or by getting preview to work correctly).
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  • Since you have the pdf at hand, could you find some pattern in these two thing among many pdfs? : Go to Tools menu-> Show inspector: 1 PDF version, and 2 PDF producer..
    – anki
    Commented Dec 14, 2019 at 13:39

1 Answer 1

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Solved (probably). I realized that I actually created the PDF from another PDF. The original PDF was poorly OCR-ed (Optical Character Recognition) and I believe that Preview was reading that OCR. I re-OCR-ed my new doc and I think that's where Acrobat was getting it. I just made a PDF of images from the old PDF and then re-OCR-ed it so that all the old metadata was gone. Thanks!

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  • What is 'OCR" ?
    – anki
    Commented Dec 15, 2019 at 7:44
  • Optical Character Recognition
    – Talos Potential
    Commented Dec 15, 2019 at 19:37

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