Text extraction from Arabic PDF General Discussions Forum

Post edited 9:20 am – 11/09/2011 by Mochum

Hi, I am a student of middle eastern languages. My task is like this: I have a few PDF files with Arabic text and want to rearrange the layout in InDesign (I only have the PDF, no other format). Copying and pasting text from the PDF results in unfortunate switched order of certain character combinations and displacement of diacritics, and text export from Acrobat to Word, RTF etc. does not seem to yield any usable results.

Would it help me if I had CS 5.5 ME? I have seen on other forums that others trying to do the same (pasting Arabic text from PDF to InDesign) have similar problems, but I haven't found a solution so far.

Or is there maybe a plugin or tool that could help me with this? I already have the IndicPlus plugin from Word-Tools, which works fine to arrange the text flow of Arabic text in InDesign, but I still have this encoding problem.

Fixing those errors manually seems like a nightmare!

Regards,

Mochum