Copy+pasting text from PDF results in garbage

Question

I am writing a Master\'s thesis - NLP system. I have one component - extractor.

It is extracting a plain text from PDF files. There are a few PDF files that can not be

Answer 1

When opened as a Gmail attachment in Chrome (the internal PDF browser) copying does copy normal readable characters!

It worked for me when I had this problem and for others as well. I think the Chrome PDF viewer uses the Google Drive OCR automatically... It's like magic!