Poppler does not handle line breaks well
This happens in Evince. I reported the bug there, but was told that it's probably an issue in Poppler. Hope I'm doing the right thing by copying it over here. Thanks for your work, and your patience with a non-coder who doesn't know exactly what to do, but wants to help make this product even better! :)
So, to the issue:
Poppler thinks that the end of every line is a line break. This creates two big problems for me:
- You can not search for text that spans more than one line.
- If you copy text that spans more than one line there's line breaks between each line.
For a long time I've thought these are limitations of the PDF format, but recently I found out that it's not like this in Firefox's built in pdf reader.
1. Search
In Firefox, if you search for the end of the first line and the beginning of the second, "da vi fikk vårt store", there's no issue. All of the words gets highlighted.
In Evince, the first words are ok: "da vi fikk", but as soon as you start typing the first word of the second line, you're told that it doesn't exist:
2. Copy
Try to copy the same paragraph from the same PDF. In Firefox you end up with normal, flowing text:
Copying in Evince you end up with text with line breaks after each line:
I'm using Evince 3.30.1 in Ubuntu 18.10 64 bit.
Thank you for your great work on this important piece of software! Please let me know if there's anything else I can do to help you fix this issue.