Producing pdf files with copyable text

[Tim]

On Sat, 2007-08-11 at 12:01 +0100, Paul Smith wrote:
> When using Acrobat Professional, the pdf files that I obtain from,
> e.g., a web-page of a newspaper contain text that one can copy to a
> word processor. However, in Linux, with
> 
> 1. print to a ps file;
> 2. use ps2pdf to convert to pdf from ps,
>
> the pdf files does not contain copyable text, as the text is
> bitmapped. Can one obtain, in Linux, pdf files with copyable text? Any
> ideas? 

I suppose that depends on the creation method.  For instance, you can
use OpenOffice to "export" a document as PDF, and you can install a PDF
printer driver for CUPs, and "print" a PDF.  You get different results
both ways, you might want to try that.  But I found exporting a document
resulted in a PDF with copyable test, printing to the CUPS-PDF driver
resulted in uncopyable.  I picked a non-standard font for my test, just
to see if one would still be copyable if I didn't use the basic fonts
commonly employed in PDFs.

I'd imagine how you created your PostScript file would have made a
difference, too.  Whether it's controlled text, or pre-rendered
graphics, possibly the use of some fonts might be a potential problem.

Info from the cups-pdf RPM:
--------------------------
"cups-pdf" is a backend script for use with CUPS - the "Common UNIX
Printing System" (see more for CUPS under http://www.cups.org/).
"cups-pdf" uses the ghostscript pdfwrite device to produce PDF Files.

This version has been modified to store the PDF files on the Desktop of
the user. This behavior can be changed by editing the configuration
file.

-- 
[tim at bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr
2.6.22.1-41.fc7 i686 i386

Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5.  Today, it's FC7.

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.