Hi there Grin,
Yes, that is quite possible. It all depends how Autocad prints the text on the PDF. Text is readily searcheable if it is printed using standard fonts such as "Arial", "Times-Roman" or "Courier". In those instances, the fonts are not included in the PDF as they are provided by the Reader. Using these fonts helps in two ways:
1. Makes the PDF file smaller (no fonts included in the PDF)
2. The text is searchable.
Moving on to "non-standard" fonts such as "Truetype" or "Postscript" fonts. These fonts need to be included in the PDF files so that they display properly. The fonts can be included in two ways:
1. As a complete font
- Makes the PDF larger
- Makes the text searchable
2. As a font subset. basically, only the letters used in the PDF are included. The fonts are stored not in order (a, b, c, ...) but rather in the order that they are written in the PDF. So, if the text in the PDF starts with "Hello" than the letters are stored as (h, e, l, ...). As a result:
- Tries to keep the PDF small
- The text is not searchable (The reader does not know which letter is "a", "b" etc)
Finally, the letters might be printed by Autocad as "curves" or as a "drawing". Again, this makes it not searchable.
The way I try to find out if the text is searchable is to use the text picker tool in the PDF Reader, highlight some of the text in the PDF, Choose "Copy" and then "Paste" it in Notepad. If the text appears the same as in the document, then it is searchable. If it appears as garbage or random characters, then you are out of luck.
I hope that helps. I tried to simplify the font handling quite a bit and hopefully it makes sense.
Cheers!
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Michel Korwin-Szymanowski
EXP Systems LLC
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