Pasted text is an object

I’m trying to edit my resume but the only copy I have is a PDF for some reason. So I loaded that into draw but every line is on object making it very difficult to edit. I tried copying some lines into Writer but they’re still objects and I can’t edit it at all. Can I convert them to normal text so I can edit them?

Getting editable text back from pdf is not well supported by LibreOffice. You may use a pdf-editor, but I am not competent to recommend one.

However, I recently wrote some user code in BASIC the main parts of which are designed for different purposes. But with a little completion it can reconstruct the RAW text from shapes in a pdf.

The code sorts the text contents by the y-position of the shapes which should not be needed for your purposes. As it will also not spoil things, I didn’t remove this part.

Thus you may play with the code contained in the attached demo.

The Sub you need to call is walkThroughSortWrite() in module DoIt.

Strange thing is that I can edit the text, Just that it’s grouped with this blue box around it. I try to ungroup but the option isn’t available.

I do quite a bit of this, and I find the best way is to Select All and Copy from within the pdf reader. Then paste-unformatted into Writer. Sometimes it helps to first paste into a text editor, to clear out non-ascii marks, and recopy. Also, some pdf readers are better than others for copying text. For instance, the one built into the Chromium browser family yields poor results.

Well that does work, but of course I lost all the formatting and a lot of the text was placed in the wrong order. I copied from Acrobat Reader.

It seems to actually work better with formatting, I’ll just have to spend some time rearranging the text. At least I kept the fonts though, thanks.

I only can recommend some professional and non-free OCR programs like Abbyy Finereader or IRIS. Especially for “ripping” tables. The problem is, as mentioned before, that even a PDF editor like masterPDF can handle the text as lines but not as continuous.