↳ In-reply-to » Gentlemen, I have a pdf file (1.5MB) which I want to be able to block and copy text writing out of it, but it's locked, preventing this. All I used to do was write it out by hand, or screen shot the text as an image. Is there any software that opens pdf format for copying and pasting of the text?

@off_grid_living@twtxt.net is it locked because of a DRM thing or something else?

Otherwise you can check if you already have the pdftotext command that comes with the poppler-utils package, try converting converting the pdf into a text file and copy to your heart’s content. I have just tried it myself.

If you don’t have it already here’s what you can do on Ubuntu or any Debian based distribution of Linux:

• Update and upgrade your packages:
  > sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
  
• Install the poppler-utils package
  > sudo apt install poppler-utils
  
• Now you can convert your pdf to txt file with:
  > pdftotxt -layout -enc UTF-8 name_of_source_file.pdf name_of_destination_file.txt
  

You can always do a pdftotxt --help to see the rest of possible options.
Hope this helps.