Weird text when copying from PDF

Question

\documentclass[12pt, a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[swedish]{babel}
\usepackage{fullpage}

\begin{document}
    åäö
\end{document}

Making a PDF from this creates a document with the text "åäö". Copying that text (OSX 10.9) results in "aa ̈o ̈"

Answer 1

The default output encoding used by LaTeX is OT1 and fonts in this encoding don't have precomposed accented characters. Therefore ä is first transformed into \"a which becomes \accent "7F a. Thus in the PDF file we get a set of elementary instructions for superimposing the dieresis to the a.

Load also

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

so the fonts used will not suffer from this problem, because they cover the glyphs used in several European languages written with the Latin alphabet. Swedish is completely covered.

\documentclass[12pt, a4paper]{article}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[swedish]{babel}

\usepackage{fullpage}

\begin{document}

åäö

\end{document}