Clipboard madness

Clipboard madness

[Lennart Borgman]

I am trying to send copy the summary text from an article in
PDF-format which I am reading with Acrobat Reader. It does not work
well at all in this case. For example ">" becomes "4". Some spaces
disappears.

I do not know what Emacs does when copying from clip board. However

  buffer-file-coding-system is a variable defined in `C source code'.
  Its value is utf-8-dos
  Local in buffer kisely-sum.txt; global value is utf-8-dos

The same thing seems to happen with the default iso-latin-1-dos.

I am doing this on w32 with recent builds.


The PDF I am reading is the full-text PDF from The British Journal of
Psychiatry 2007 v. 191, p. 373-374 (Kisely and Campbell). It is
available on this page:

  http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/vol191/issue5/

I am just copying the text in "Summary", after that word (from
"Supervised" to the end of the paragraph).


Can anyone please shed some light on this?

Re: Clipboard madness

[Miles Bader]

Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
> I am trying to send copy the summary text from an article in
> PDF-format which I am reading with Acrobat Reader. It does not work
> well at all in this case. For example ">" becomes "4". Some spaces
...
>   http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/vol191/issue5/
>
> I am just copying the text in "Summary", after that word (from
> "Supervised" to the end of the paragraph).
>
> Can anyone please shed some light on this?

I don't think it's an Emacs (or Windows) problem -- I same behavior when
pasting that text into e.g. gnome-terminal, on Debian.

-Miles

-- 
Guilt, n. The condition of one who is known to have committed an indiscretion,
as distinguished from the state of him who has covered his tracks.

Re: Clipboard madness

[Lennart Borgman]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 4:58 AM, Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:
> Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
>> I am trying to send copy the summary text from an article in
>> PDF-format which I am reading with Acrobat Reader. It does not work
>> well at all in this case. For example ">" becomes "4". Some spaces
> ...
>>   http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/vol191/issue5/
>>
>> I am just copying the text in "Summary", after that word (from
>> "Supervised" to the end of the paragraph).
>>
>> Can anyone please shed some light on this?
>
> I don't think it's an Emacs (or Windows) problem -- I same behavior when
> pasting that text into e.g. gnome-terminal, on Debian.


Thanks for testing. Are you using Acrobat Reader?

Re: Clipboard madness

[Miles Bader]

Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
>>> Can anyone please shed some light on this?
>>
>> I don't think it's an Emacs (or Windows) problem -- I same behavior when
>> pasting that text into e.g. gnome-terminal, on Debian.
>
> Thanks for testing. Are you using Acrobat Reader?

Nope (I used Evince, which is a Gtk app that uses poppler for PDF
stuff), so not an Acrobat bug either.

I'm wondering if it's just a wonky PDF file...

-Miles

-- 
Erudition, n. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Re: Clipboard madness

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <e01d8a50912171941h68dacd88g740c45786c6ffaae@mail.gmail.com>, Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:

> I am trying to send copy the summary text from an article in
> PDF-format which I am reading with Acrobat Reader. It does not work
> well at all in this case. For example ">" becomes "4". Some spaces
> disappears.
[...]
> The PDF I am reading is the full-text PDF from The British Journal of
> Psychiatry 2007 v. 191, p. 373-374 (Kisely and Campbell). It is
> available on this page:

>   http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/vol191/issue5/

> I am just copying the text in "Summary", after that word (from
> "Supervised" to the end of the paragraph).

I see that problem on GNU/Linux Ubunto too, not only with
Emacs but also with the other applications; gnome-terminal,
gedit, etc.  Even more, I see the problem when I paste it to
the search box of acroread itself.

So, I think there's no way to fix it on Emacs side.

---
Kenichi Handa
handa@m17n.org

Re: Clipboard madness

[tomas]

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On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 04:41:44AM +0100, Lennart Borgman wrote:
> I am trying to send copy the summary text from an article in
> PDF-format which I am reading with Acrobat Reader. It does not work
> well at all in this case. For example ">" becomes "4". Some spaces
> disappears.
> 
> I do not know what Emacs does when copying from clip board. However

[...]

>   http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/vol191/issue5/
> 
> I am just copying the text in "Summary", after that word (from
> "Supervised" to the end of the paragraph).
> 
> 
> Can anyone please shed some light on this?

Running pdftotext over it shows heavily mangled text (things are
misplaced, etc). I get the impression that text was "deduced" from the
laayout after the fact, as if someone running OCR over a print.

Surely some distiller abomination :-(

Regards
- -- tomás
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Re: Clipboard madness

[Lennart Borgman]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 5:06 AM, Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:
> Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
>>>> Can anyone please shed some light on this?
>>>
>>> I don't think it's an Emacs (or Windows) problem -- I same behavior when
>>> pasting that text into e.g. gnome-terminal, on Debian.
>>
>> Thanks for testing. Are you using Acrobat Reader?
>
> Nope (I used Evince, which is a Gtk app that uses poppler for PDF
> stuff), so not an Acrobat bug either.
>
> I'm wondering if it's just a wonky PDF file...


Yes, it looks like that. I asked here and got some advice on how it is
possible to further look into such problems:

  http://forums.adobe.com/message/2468131#2468131