Trouble Exporting Text of PDFs? Edit Tags in Acrobat

You may have encountered problems when saving the text of a PDF file to a separate text file. A produced document with blank space at the bottom of the page may omit a Bates number in the resulting text file. An error message such as this one, "Unable to convert untagged document to Tagged PDF":

. . . may appear and prevent the text from being saved to a text file at all. These problems indicate that there's an issue with tags for the PDF. Adobe Acrobat uses tags to identify the reading order of a page, and its overall layout, accounting for tables, lists, and footers. Tags are generated automatically, but this process may not produce the results you need. You can edit tags for a PDF in the 'Accessibility' section of Tools in Adobe Acrobat.

If you click on the Order icon in the toolbar on the left (see the 'X' icon), a tree will open displaying each page with subdirectories showing the tags on each page.

Clicking on 'Add Tags to Document' will bring up on a pane on the left in which a description for PDF tags is given. Scroll to the bottom and click on the link named 'To fix this structure problem, click on this link to activate the Touch Up Reading Order tool.' A new dialog box will open, and the tags will be displayed on the document.

To make it possible to export all of the text on a page, draw a box around the full content and then click on the 'Text' box.

It will then be possible to save everything to a text file.