Feature request for version >=21: add option to show actual characters when selecting text, not just the selection box
With poppler 0.90.0 on Fedora 33 I could see the actual characters in PDF documents when selecting text. This is an important feature for me because it allows me to check for errors in scanned and OCR'd documents.
After upgrading to Fedora 34 I got poppler 21. Unfortunately the text selection optics in PDF viewers changed. I can no longer see the actual selected characters but only the selection rectangle, superimposed on the background image. For my use case this gives a false sense of security because the selected characters (from the text layer) can differ from the characters shown in the background image.
The only means to get the old behavior back for me was downgrading to poppler 0.90.0.
Here's an image of the old (wanted) behavior where the characters show:
Here's an image of the new behavior where the actual characters are not visible anymore (only the background image):
I propose some kind of feature flag to explicitly get the old behavior back and to show the actual characters that are selected to easily spot OCR errors.