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Since updating to debian jessie I have a problem with copy and paste from PDF files using xpdf: only letters/symbols contained in ASCII are copied correctly. All other symbols/letters are in some way garbeld.

For example I have a PDF file containg the German word "Würde". Copying it from xpdf and pasting it I get: "Würde". Other PDF readers (e.g. acroread, zathura) work ok. The problem arrises with all PDF files containing non ASCII text/symbols.

In /etc/xpdf/xpdfrc I have:

textEncoding UTF-8

I tested it with Latin1 and ASCII, but there was no change at all. (There is no .xpdfrc in my home folder.)

> locale
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES=POSIX
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

> locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
de_DE.utf8
POSIX

Any suggestions how I could get copy and paste working again?

newtothis
  • 51

1 Answers1

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The problem is the result of two bugs of Debian's xpdf:

#737989 describes the problem (selection of non-ASCII characters no longer works) and provides a patch in two patch files. Unfortunately applying the patch doesn't solve the problem.

This is linked to a second bug #739271 (many config file directives not working). Applying additionally to the patch above the patches provided here (poppler-xpdfparams, poppler-gfile-dedupe -- second one probably not necessary) and changing /debian/patches/series and /debian/rules as explained in message #22 to this bug, seems to resolve the problem.

To prevent cluttering of the screen with too many error messages I also commented out the line include /etc/xpdf/includes in /etc/xpdf/xpdfrc.

newtothis
  • 51