Bug 92516

Summary:	Cannot copy text from specific pdf in evince
Product:	poppler	Reporter:	Christopher M. Penalver <christopher.m.penalver>
Component:	general	Assignee:	poppler-bugs <poppler-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED NOTOURBUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:
Attachments:	emrscheme-1.pdf

Description Christopher M. Penalver 2015-10-18 01:43:46 UTC

Created attachment 118948 [details]
emrscheme-1.pdf

Upstreaming as advised in:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=741623

Downstream report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/545176

lsb_release -rd
Description:	Ubuntu Wily Werewolf (development branch)
Release:	15.10

apt-cache policy poppler-utils
poppler-utils:
  Installed: 0.33.0-0ubuntu3
  Candidate: 0.33.0-0ubuntu3
  Version table:
 *** 0.33.0-0ubuntu3 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ wily/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

What is expected to happen with Evince is that when one opens the attached PDF file, one may select any of the text, just like in Adobe Reader.

What happens instead is only a handful of letters are selectable as per https://launchpadlibrarian.net/41742091/Screenshot-2.png . First reported against Ubuntu 9.10 evince 2.28.1-0ubuntu1.2 / poppler-utils 0.12.4-0ubuntu4.

Comment 1 Jason Crain 2016-01-07 18:56:23 UTC

I don't see why it would be useful to select text from this document.  You aren't going to be able to copy and paste any readable text from it.  The document doesn't use a standard encoding or include a way to map from charcode to text, so at best you're going to get a bunch of random letters and control characters.

Comment 2 Christopher M. Penalver 2016-01-08 10:04:01 UTC

Jason Crain, thanks for taking a look. Given your point about the documents encoding is confirmed with Windows 10's built-in PDF reader, this is considered closed.

Use of freedesktop.org services, including Bugzilla, is subject to our Code of Conduct. How we collect and use information is described in our Privacy Policy.