Re: problem mouse copy/past from PDF
On Tue 20 Sep 2016 at 21:05:29 +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 06:30:10PM +0100, Brian wrote:
> >
> > Selection of text from a pdf isn't always possible with evince. Example:
> >
> > paps /etc/nssitch.conf > nsswitch.ps
> ^^^ probably typo
> > ps2pdf nsswitch.ps nsswitch.pdf
> >
> > When it is selectable it isn't necessarily capable of being copied.
> >
> > Isn't life confusing?
>
> I can confirm that a pdf produced this way has no usable text to
> select (tested here with xpdf). If you generate the .ps with a2ps
>
> a2ps /etc/nsswitch.conf -o nsswitch.ps
>
> then "it works". Thus, it seems to be paps who's doing something
> strange (and in fact, looking at the Postscript file yields something
> pretty funny. Paps seems to be out-smarting itself.
>
> Note that a Postscript (or a PDF) can render something which *looks*
> like text, but for all purposes *isn't* a text (for an extreme case,
> think a bitmap image of a text).
Although it is a different topic
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26066535/ps2pdf-creates-a-very-big-pdf-file-from-paps-created-ps-file
backs up your "pretty funny" feeling. KenS is a Ghostscript developer.
> The problem is the paps file, it doesn't actually contain any
> text at all, in a PostScript sense.
The response was
> As the author of paps, I agree with the above description of
> paps' inner workings. Indeed, I chose to create my own font
> mechanism in the postscript language. That is history though
> as I have just released a new version of paps that uses cairo
> for its postscript, pdf, or svg rendering.
Maybe this new version does not fix mouse copying from a PDF generated
from paps' PS but it isn't in unstable anyway. (Furthermore, paps isn't
in testing due to a FTBFS).
--
Brian.
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