Re: [RFC] Enable both boxed and plain text selection

[Kristian Høgsberg <krh redhat com>]

Luca Ferretti wrote:
> The boxed text selection is really really useful when you have to cut
> and past from a 2 column document (i.e. all LaTeX article type
> document :-) .
>
> Using the simple, i-beam text selection currently implemented in Evince,
> you can't select only the text in one column: the selection covers both
> columns :-| Attached here is the cut and paste from the Ximian Evolution
> copyright form.

Right now the text-flow based selection is still a bit rough.  Most of 
the work has been going into just drawing the selection and making that 
work in evince.  The poppler selection algorithm still needs a bit of 
tuning, but I've put that off until we got it integrated in evince.  Now 
that evince can be used to interactively test the selection, I'm 
planning to work on fine tuning the selection mechanism.

So, what I'm trying to say is, the rectangular selection shouldn't be 
necessary for selection text from just one of two (or more) columns, 
poppler should be able to figure out the text flow.  That's not working 
very well now, but I'm hoping that's a bug we can fix.

cheers,
Kristian