Posted on Wednesday 23 March 2005
I’ve received an eps file from a client. There was a lot of text in it and I needed to copy and paste this text to create an HTML version of the page in addition to the Flash version. The trouble was that the text was made up of small ‘islands’ of about 8 characters and when I tried copying and pasting from Illustrator the islands reassembled in a quasi-random fashion to form unreadable text. I’m guessing this had to do with some export filters that didn’t do a very good job; you may have encountered such a file yourself. Importing into Flash didn’t do much good either as instead of islands I ended up with a text field for each line of text.
The solution: print the EPS file from Illustrator to Distiller and open the PDF in Acrobat. The text is magically put back together and can be safely copied and pasted.
