Copy-protected PDF files

Question

Hello,

I have copy protected PDF files. I can open them, but when I copy and paste I get obfuscated text.

Is there a way to transform them into normal PDFs, then input them into Form Recognizer Studio? Or do I have to convert them to images using pdf2image (can be different package), and only then use Form Recognizer Studio?

Any insights or suggestions on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance! That's the first time I've come across protected PDFs.

Answer 1

Hi @mmmm , Thanks for using Microsoft Q&A Platform.

I haven't worked on a protected PDF file. If the PDF files are copy-protected, I believe you may not be able to extract text from them directly.

I would recommend you try a PDF conversion tool that includes such as Adobe Acrobat Pro or ABBYY FineReader Pdf to remove the copy protection from the PDFs, and then use Form Recognizer Studio to extract text from the PDFs.

You can also try using a PDF converter to convert the PDFs to an image format such as JPEG/JPG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF formats. and then use Form Recognizer Studio to extract text from the images.

You can refer to this document to know more about Form Recognizer input file requirements: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/applied-ai-services/form-recognizer/concept-general-document?view=form-recog-3.0.0#input-requirements

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Vasavi

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