they were tough on me and everyoneAfter looking inside the PDF it turns out that no usable encoding information is present (neither in the PDF nor in the embedded font data) to derive the meaning of the characters/glyphs that are displayed on the pages in the document. The fonts actualy are all embedded, but in a way that all encoding information has been removed. This is a typical example of a PDF that is syntactically fully compliant with the PDF spec but where important information about the meaning of the text in it has been thrown away during the process of making the PDF. As far as I can tell it would be very difficult to recover the encoding info. Strange as it may sound the best option may be to convert the pages to oixel and then run OCR on them.... According to the document info PageMaker 7 and Distiller 5 have been used - not sure whether that combination wasn't quite up to the task but I am on Acrobat 9 now and haven't seen Pagemaker for years...