Can I extract text from .pdfs with Publisher?
- If there is a OCR layer in the PDF you can select a portion or all of the text and copy it to another document. But that is inherent in PDFs and in either MacOS or iOS can be done in any app including Preview, Pages, Notes, Word, and virtually every app including Publisher.
- If there is NO OCR layer in the PDF publisher can cut and paste a section of text as a graphic image but it is not editable.
- Affinity Publisher does NOT have OCR capability and can neither create an OCR layer or edit a PDF. For that you will need an app such as Adobe Acrobat DC (the cloud based version) $14.99 a month with a one year contract, PDFPen pro 11 $124.99, PDF Pen 11 $74.99 PDF OCR X Enterprise Edition $24.99, or any one of a number of other OCR capable apps available from the App Store.
NOTE: IMHO price is exponentially proportional with functionality and capability. FWIW I am still using PDF Pen 10 as I don't need the additional functionality of PDF Pen Pro 10 or 11 and it still serves quite well even under Catalina so I not found a reason to upgrade to version 11 — yet. 😉
