{copy-paste} is about copying text and other elements from one place (often a PDF file) and allowing it to be pasted. Searching for text (in a PDF file) is a process closely related to copying because both use the OCR (optical character recognition) layer in the PDF file.
{copy-paste} is about copying text and other elements from a print-ready document (often a PDF file; possibly a DVI or PS file) to the desktop's clipboard or some other buffer, allowing it to be pasted into other documents.
The ability to cut and paste is generally expected in PDF files, as is the related feature of document search, because the PDF format allows the content of pages to be decorated with textual information using what are called tags. Tagged PDFs will generally specify how displayed text passages or mathematical formulae can be copied into plain text, rich text, or MathML, so that PDF viewers can offer a convenient copy-and-paste interface and search facilities.
FAQ
- Ensuring PDFs are tagged to allow copy-and-paste and searching in pdfTeX: What are good ways to make pdflatex output copy-and-pasteable?
- Ensuring PDFs are tagged to allow copy-and-paste and searching in XeTeX: Small-caps, old-style numbers, and some ligatures produce odd symbols in PDF copy text?
- Support for rich text: Are there any (La)TeX editors that accept pasting rich text?
- Obfuscated PDF (PDFs that are human readable but make copy-paste and search hard to support): Is it possible to produce a PDF with un-copyable text? (general case) and PDF with un-copyable text in LuaLaTeX (special font handling for LuaTeX)
