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Clayton.G
Participant
Dec 17, 2020 4:35 PM UTC
Question

Text copied from some PDFs has all spaces stripped

In many of the PDFs my users are working with, copying text out of the PDF loses all whitespace, with the words all concatenated together. This makes the PDF Embed API unusable, and they're having to fall back to the browser's native PDF viewer.

 

In the paper available here (open access, PDF also attached), copying the caption for Table 1 in the Chrome PDF viewer gives "The acylcarnitine profiles in dried blood spots detected by tandem mass spectrometry", but the PDF Embed API gives "Theacylcarnitineprofilesindriedbloodspotsdetectedbytandemmassspectrometry" instead, which is not useful for my purposes. This is particularly common with table and figure captions.

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      6 replies

      Sina37498085n7li
      Participant
      May 19, 2024 8:33 PM UTC

      This issue still has not been fixed. When I try to search for the word using ctrl + F, the words have spaces. But when I copy the text, all the spaces are gone. This can be quite problematic for the user. 

      This happens in only some pdfs and not all. 

       

      Please provide an update. 

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      Raymond Camden
      Community Manager
      Raymond CamdenCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      May 20, 2024 1:11 PM UTC

      I can confirm the issue still exists. I will search to see if this was properly logged, and if not, will log it. 

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      Sina37498085n7li
      Participant
      May 21, 2024 6:01 PM UTC

      Hi Raymond, 

      Thank you for replying. 

      Thanks to you and Joel, I understand why this issue occurs now.

      But is there a timeline for fixing issues such as this?

      If not, do you know of any workarounds that can be implemented on the developers' end, such as pre-processing the PDF and merging boxes together? 

       

      Thanks again and I look forward to your response,

      Sina

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      Adobe Employee
      Sumona Ghosh
      Adobe Employee
      Jun 11, 2021 8:33 AM UTC

      Sorry for the inconvenience. We have noted this down and will let you know when it gets resolved. Stay tuned!

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