Why do control characters appear when I copy sentences from a PDF file created via LaTeX?

Question

When I drag and copy text from PDF file that was compiled by LaTeX, often the content is not fully preserved. Diacritics are separated from characters, some math symbols change into other symbols and even control characters appear. All encodings are UTF8. Why does this happen?

Can you post a minimal document that produces the kind of problem you describe? Just because the input is utf-8 doesn't mean the output is. Are you using pdflatex or xelatex or lualatex? You might get better results with one of the latter two. — frabjous, Oct 04 '22 at 05:02
If you don't accept the solution of "switch to XeTeX/LuaTeX", the fix would be very font-dependent and encoding-dependent. Refer to pdftex - Make ligatures in Linux Libertine copyable (and searchable) - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange pdf - How can I make the copied-pasted text from an pdflatex output still readable/compilable by pdflatex? - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange pdftex - Cannot copy letters with diacritics from pdflatex PDF - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange — user202729, Oct 04 '22 at 05:35
With pdflatex you should get better results for text if you use \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}. For math you can try the mmap package (but it depends on your math setup). — Ulrike Fischer, Oct 04 '22 at 07:46
You say All encodings are UTF8. but none of the fonts used by pdftex for the text in the PDF are Unicode fonts. pdftex can only use fonts with 256 characters, and most only have 127 so all the code points in the pdf are < 256. It is possible (sometimes) to embed a mapping back to unicode so a pdf reader can generate Unicode text for the clipboard, but the details are tricky and font dependent — David Carlisle, Oct 04 '22 at 09:48

Why do control characters appear when I copy sentences from a PDF file created via LaTeX?

0 Answers0