When I copy text out of a PDF file and into a text editor, it ends up mangled in a variety of ways. Formatting like bold and italics are lost; soft line breaks within a paragraph of text are converted to hard line breaks; dashes to break a word over two lines are preserved even when they shouldn't be; and single and double quotes are replaced with? Ideally, I'd like to be able to copy text from a PDF and have formatting converted to HTML codes, 'smart quotes' converted to ' and ', and line breaks done properly. Is there any way to do this? Firstly, you have to understand what a PDF is.

PDFs are designed to mimic a printed page, and they are designed only as an output format, not an input format. A PDF is basically a map containing the exact location of characters (individual letters or punctuation, etc.) or images. In most cases, a PDF does not even store information about where one word ends and another begins, much less things like soft breaks vs. Longman Interactive English Program. Hard breaks for paragraph endings. (A few recent PDFs do store some information about this stuff, but that's a new technology, and you'd be lucky to find PDFs like that. Even if you did, your PDF viewer might not know about it.) Anyway, it's up to your software to implement some kind of 'artificial intelligence' to extract merely from the locations of individual characters what is a word, what is a paragraph, and so on. Different software is going to do this better than others, and it's also going to depend on how the PDF was made.