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Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF

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On Sun 18 Sep 2016 at 16:14:37 (-0400), Haines Brown wrote:
> I've begun to experience problems using the mouse to select a passage in
> a PDF displayed with xpdf 3.03-10 in order to paste it elsewhere.
> 
> The ends of lines are truncated to varying degrees. For example in a
> PDF with this:
> 
>   123456789
>   123456789
>   1234567
> 
> The past might look like
> 
>   12345678
>   1234567
>   123456

Can you confirm that dragging your mouse produces a black rectangle,
and that the rectangle has the last digits (the ones that get lost)
highlighted thus.

My own experience is all or nothing. What I get correlates with the
output of pdftotext; if that can extract the text, I can copy it
with the mouse, if not then I can't. PDFs I produce with paps, for
example, don't work: I don't know why this is the case.

Actually, there is a third case: the pasted text is garbage. I think
this happens if the fonts are stripped of unused glyphs and then
packed into the minimum number of fonts to save memory. I may be
wrong here, though.

> Evince apparently does not support selecting text for copying. This does
> not happen on other machines.

My experience here is similar to xpdf but with a few differences: when
it works (the same files do), the selection is line by line (ie like
an xterm) rather than a strict rectangle; if it can't do it, it
doesn't highlight (whereas xpdf "lies": it highlights but fails to
copy); the highlighting may be coloured (white→blue, black→white) or
black (which hides the text).

Cheers,
David.

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Thread

problem mouse copy/past from PDF Haines Brown <haines@histomat.net> - 2016-09-18 22:30 +0200
  Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF Celejar <celejar@gmail.com> - 2016-09-20 04:00 +0200
    Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF Lisi Reisz <lisi.reisz@gmail.com> - 2016-09-20 17:20 +0200
      Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-09-20 19:40 +0200
        Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2016-09-20 21:10 +0200
          Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-09-21 12:40 +0200
            Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2016-09-21 18:20 +0200
              Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2016-09-22 07:10 +0200
                Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2016-09-22 08:00 +0200
  Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2016-09-20 05:50 +0200
    Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF Doug <dmcgarrett@optonline.net> - 2016-09-20 07:00 +0200
      Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF Doug <dmcgarrett@optonline.net> - 2016-09-20 07:20 +0200
    Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-09-20 16:10 +0200
      Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2016-09-20 18:10 +0200
        Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-09-20 19:30 +0200
        Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2016-09-20 21:10 +0200
      Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-09-21 21:40 +0200
        Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2016-09-22 07:50 +0200

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