-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tue, Sep 20, 2016 at 06:30:10PM +0100, Brian wrote: > On Tue 20 Sep 2016 at 16:12:35 +0100, Lisi Reisz wrote: > > > On Monday 19 September 2016 14:15:03 Celejar wrote: > > > On Sun, 18 Sep 2016 16:14:37 -0400 > > > Haines Brown <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > ... > > > > > > > Evince apparently does not support selecting text for copying. This does > > > > > > My evince (3.14.1, from 3.14.1-2+deb8u1) does support selecting text > > > for copying. > > > > > > Celejar > > > > Mine too. But then I also have 3.14.1-2+deb8u1. > > 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). regards - -- tomás -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAlfhiHkACgkQBcgs9XrR2kbeIgCfXjP4EstyiF12pOKrhSRTdfQa FCkAn1YdHq5nqaeuzmLozFr6OTHsr2HD =LsXh -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
