Hi Alessandro, Let me clarify a bit.
The current standards for text encoding, Unicode, does not distinguish the Serbian Cyrillic glyphs -- they are regarded as a style. A stylistic substitution of glyphs can be specified, as you pointed out, by an OpenType font. PDF typically contains glyphs extracted from fonts, and supports a table mapping of glyphs to Unicode. With this mapping, the display application may re-construct the Unicode text, for the purpose of copying. What goes wrong here, is that many PDF generating libraries fail to fill this PDF table out. This means, the replacement Serbian glyph is not correctly mapped to its original Unicode text. LibreOffice is putting *styled* text into the clipboard. That means, it records which font was used to display the text. When pasted into another program that handles styled text (on a system with the same font installed!!!), the result is as you describe-- substitutions are carried out as instructed by the font. However in neither case are you copying Serbian glyphs. Your copied Unicode characters. With LibreOffice it also records that the text was styled with a certain font. And the PDF copying failed because the PDF generating software failed to record which glyphs correspond to which Unicode characters. Some months ago, I made a comparison of PDF generating software in this regard. The functionality varies greatly among them. This situation could stand improvement. I advocate that the libraries draw mapping information from the tables in the font. There is a standard involving the naming of glyphs in a font, which is used by some font-generating libraries to guess the mapping, in the ignorance of the OpenType tables that actuall *effect* the mapping. This is a very crummy band-aid, but it can work in situations such as yours, in some programs. You just need to find a font where the glyphs are named according to that standard, and a program that makes use of that. One other thought: I have never seen an application for display of graphical documents such as PDF produce styled text, but...in principle -- the names of the fonts are stored in the document, as is information such as scaling of the glyphs... Sounds messy, but possible. Not convinced it's *desirable*. But the first thing is to get the mapping right. On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 10:16 PM, Alessandro Ceschini <alescesc1...@yahoo.it> wrote: > Serbian Cyrillic requires a peculiar localisation because some glyphs are > different from the standard. The PDF produced by XeLaTeX however must have > some glitch because if I try copy/paste from it to another document the > characters affected by Serbian localisation simply disappear :-\ ! This > doesn't happen with PDF produced by LibreOffice 4.1, which now supports > OpenType and therefore localised glyphs: characters are correctly copied, > and even if the recipient program doesn't support OpenType, then standard > glyphs are displayed. > -- > Alessandro Ceschini > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex > -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
