Re: Copying text from PDF?

[John Coppens <john jcoppens com>]

On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 12:22:40 +0000
Tony Graham <Tony Graham Sun COM> wrote:

> The xmlroff XSL formatter (http://xmlroff.org) uses GNOME Print to
> produce PDF.
> 
> An xmlroff user has pointed out that when he attempts to copy text
> from a viewed PDF document, the text is garbled when it is pasted into
> another application.
> 
> xmlroff isn't doing anything to garble the text.  Is this a feature of
> GNOME Print's PDF?

This is probably because the PDF contains a font (or even several
fonts) for representing the text which does not have standard ASCII
encoding. This is really a pain, because there is - as far as I know - no
tool that takes into account these internal (strangely coded) fonts. These
PDFs show up ok in Acrobat but not in xpdf.

The problem can be solved with a simple script which adds/subtracts a
value from each character value and then regenerates the text (except for
spaces, which seem to be ok).

John

> Regards,
> 
> 
> Tony Graham
> -- 
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