I have a French thesis which I am trying to read, to better understand some parts I am trying to copy some text and use that in google translate, however if I copy text I am getting just rubbish as the pasted text. Most probably there is a problem with the encoding. And even more strangely, I can copy text from the first cover page of the document correctly which is also in French but from the rest, I am just getting a full of rubbish characters from the text that I pasted from the clipboard. Any ideas on how to read parts of this thesis?
pdftotext
? It's in the package calledpoppler-utils
.