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.