zlacker

>>heyden+(OP)
> This remains a long-standing pet peeve of mine. PDFs like this are horrible to read on mobile phones, hard to copy-and-paste from ...

I've never understood why copying text from digitally native PDFs (created directly from digital source files, rather than by OCR-ing scanned images) is so often such a poor experience. Even PDFs produced from LaTex often contain undesirable ligatures in the copied text like fi and fl. Text copied from some Springer journals sometimes lacks space between words or introduces unwanted space between letters in a word ... Is it due to something inherent in PDF technology?

>>aragon+Nda
It’s due to poor choices made in the implementation of pdfTeX. For example the TeX engine does not associate the original space characters with the inter-word “glue” that replaces them, so pdfTeX happily omits them. This was fixed a few years back, finally. But there’s millions(?) of papers out there with no spaces.