Just because you can put down a cursor and go from one x,y to another x,y does not mean you are "selecting" what is visible on the screen, as your human eyes see it.
Whoever said they were human eyes ;). Seriously though, while there are always encoding issues and the like, given a reasonable application/clipboard type the region you select should be what is visible, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Are you just making the point that when I select the text it's converting an essentially drawn image into an encoding text. But of course anything displayed on the monitor or printed out could be argued to be just pixels and/or vectors.
PDF is pure layout, no structure. Tables are positioned text and lines, columns are positioned text... its basically OCR, without any character detection.
Sorry, just guess I'm confused. You said there was no text in pdfs (implying to me just images). Chapter 5 of the Reference has a lot of info of how to include text. I'm not sure what OCR (Optical Character Recognition) means if it doesn't do any character detection... I didn't see any mention of structure anywhere in the email you sent. Just that it was impossible to have text. Which is odd since there are regions of text in a pdf document with instructions on how to draw that text. They can be encoded or just inserted when creating the document. Granted, the encoded streams are a bit of a pain, but they're arguably just as much text as any other I'm not trying to make a mountain of a molehill here. Just didn't want some people to get the impression that pdfs were solely graphic-orientated (like say...jpeg). Perhaps we have different ideas of text. Seriously, no offense to anyone. Just wanted to clarify things. I'm skeptical about bowerbird's claims as well, but it's misleading to say that Acrobat doesn't store text in the document. It is possible to make the text rather obscure, but that doesn't mean that if formatted correctly you could not scan through the file in a text editor and read it. Granted, it's rarely done, but doesn't mean it's impossible. Jon
David A. Desrosiers desrod@gnu-designs.com http://gnu-designs.com _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d