On Tue 20 Sep 2016 at 21:05:29 +0200, to...@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.
