Convert PDF > Rich Text creates unwanted images in text

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1

When I convert a pdf to rich text I always get an image of the pdf in the converted text. This is never what I want — it means I have to go through every converted text and remove the image afterwards.

I can’t find a way of turning this behaviour off (and I can’t convert to plain text because I’d lose bold/italic etc.) The Display PDF Attachments of rich texts settings has no effect.

Is there a setting to disable this behaviour? If not, does anyone know of a way of stripping out all the images automatically?

Thanks.

EDIT: Found a way of getting to the underlying text — open the document as a folder in Finder and look at the underlying TXT.rtf file. But that’s not really a sustainable solution. Is there a less clunky way? Thanks.

2

I can’t reproduce this. Please post a screencap of what you’re seeing.

3

Thanks Jim. Here you go…

It’s always done this (several years), as far as I remember: it’s just that I’ve started to use it more often, so it’s becoming irritating.

But I’ve just tested, and it only seems to happen on a pdf which has itself been converted from PNG, like this one:

Screenshot 2018-02-06 10.53.51.png
Screenshot 2018-02-06 10.53.51.png1418×856 330 KB

I typically use if for getting text from screenshots, which is what I did here: screenshot of our posts > import > convert to pdf > convert to rich text > swear at embedded image…

4

Our free WordService includes a service to remove attachments. Another possibility is to use AppleScript:


tell application id "DNtp"
	tell text of think window 1
		repeat with theAttribute in attribute runs
			if exists attachment 1 of theAttribute then
				set text of theAttribute to ""
			end if
		end repeat
	end tell
end tell
5

Thanks Christian — those are both very helpful!

Is it a bug, by the way, or is it expected behaviour with converted PNGs?

6

It’s more or less expected, the actual conversion is performed by macOS’ PDFKit framework and therefore the results might vary depending on the document and the macOS version.

7

Thanks for your help, Christian.