Producing pdf files with copyable text

[Chris Mohler]

On 8/12/07, Paul Smith <phhs80 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have tried with all available pdf viewers, but the text is not
> copyable at all. Something seems to be wrong with the method 'print to
> ps + ps2pdf'.

Let's try for a common target:

Target: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/fedorapeople.org

Methods:
1 - cups-pdf.  Produces copyable text in Adobe Reader

2 - LOOP extension for FF.  Also produces copyable text

3 - Openoffice - text *is* copyable, but the formatting is horrible!

4 - I did 'select all' in FF, made a new OO doc, and pasted it in.
PDF export produces a file with copyable text, and decent formatting.

In summary, I was able to produce a PDF w/copyable text using all four
methods.  #3 looked like hell, but the text was there.  Seems like #4
ought to Just Work.  I'm curious - can anyone can duplicate my
results?  I went into further detail about each method previously.

Chris

PS - I've found that not all pages work with method #1 - on some pages
(gmail, e.g.), the text appears to be copyable, but it is in fact
copying gibberish to the clipboard.  By gibberish, I mean those nice
little unicode character boxes that you see when your font can't do
UTF-8.