Migrating PDFs to RW: Copy Issues

[Chemlak]

I bow to Rob's superior understanding of PDFs (which should come as no great surprise to anyone, really).

[Acenoid]

Maybe this will help?

http://www.wikihow.com/Modify-Font-P...g_the_File_sub

[EightBitz]

Originally Posted by rob

Yes, that's correct. A PDF is nothing more than individual letters positioned on a page. That's it. Nothing more.

I copy words
To paste them into RealmWorks, but the spacing's off.
It takes so long
To edit what I've pasted, man this task is rough.

Text on a page.
A PDF's just text on a page.
Copy Paste
Proofing takes forever, and it hurts my eyes
All this text
I think I'll hit the forums, get some good advice

Ooooh, ooooh, ooooooooooooh
*violins*

[Asandir]

Here's my favorite one for this issue: Even printing it and running it through a decent OCR program it has issues.

If non~ ofth~ qu~tions ~aMWf'rw with
li~., and at IU5l On~ qu~.tionwa. an.w,,~wilh a
tm~ altS\<",r, th~ spirits II1iI)' implant a "P"ll in your
mind asArd<-sdlr$$oIkrCOllc.oct~d.. As Ions a.you
~ast at J.e.iil 011" spdI of 5£b In",1 or '-",r wilhin
l-l hours bdore casting Ard~.5af~conlaet,)'ou
immwiat~1y pu-~ a .prll in~of th~aprndw
spell. This n"" spdI is of th" """""' !nod a. th~
aprndw .prll. and is~by tM spirit in
q~n. no! by you: 'fOU nttd. DDt """" know 'M
spell, and in rareG1l56 ~ spdl IIW)'DDt nom be on
~clawiliR. Thccbo5rn spdI is 5Iond in your
mind as though p~in thr: nonn.tl. fashion. 1h~
spdl is 5riU prq»M ........, ifyou are a "P"n~
spdlG1lSt~r, m~anins thallhr .........."'~ spell 5101 can
only be apr~On 1Mrna..,., sprll (though 01M!"
spell MoIsan 1lIUl'Ifft~). If th~ implantw spell
""'I.uiU'S mat~rial compoIl"nts, you still mUSI provid~
thtm in ordu to cut ~ spdl. Thr implantw "P"U
u-mains prq»~ until th" =xt tim,,)'Ou ....t and
rKO\",r opells, and if it ham't!>ttn cast by the ~nd of
that time, it iswast~.

[daplunk]

Oh wow that's a bad case. I see the odd issue but nothing on this level!

[Asandir]

Yeah, it's fantastic isn't it? And it happens with a good chunk of this 3rd party publisher's product.

[rob]

Yikes! More than likely, the 3PP is using a freeware font that doesn't properly support all the things that a professional font would normally include, which then results in the corresponding text just being gibberish.

I've seen this with a few fonts used sparsely in a few PDF products, but nothing remotely as messed up as the example above. Ugh.

[Parody]

Along with the possible font issue, I wonder what they're using to generate those PDFs and what application they came from.

If they left it in, you can see that info in Adobe Reader in the Properties window (File/Properties... or Ctrl-D) on the Description tab.

[Asandir]

Let's see:

Helvetica
Helvetica Bold
Helvetica Oblique
Hidden HorzOCR (embedded)
Magical Medieval (Embedded subset)
Olsen TF Regular
Times Bold
Times Italic
Times Roman

[Parody]

OK then. It looks like some or all of the document was created by Acrobat's built-in OCR capabilities and they didn't bother to check and fix the resulting text. Depending on the options they chose it may actually look like a mix of text and bitmaps, or it might appear as just the scanned images and the text completely hidden (only used for searching and copy/paste).

FWIW: I have not seen this in legitimately published book PDFs but I can believe that some publishers might not care to fix their work, especially for old books for which they no longer have either the source document (and all of its parts) or the application in which it was created and a system that can run that application (or that predate "modern" desktop publishing). :(

(Sorry if I'm flailing a bit; I don't OCR things but I do a lot of other desktop publishing work.)