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According to the docu there are some new features in texlive 2014. One of them is a command \pdfinterwordspaceon. It seems as if it adds spaces between the words, so that I can just copy and paste from a PDF. OK.

Can somebody give an example where this command is useful? Years ago I had issues with text copied from PDF without any space between words, but that was long ago. Even under texlive 2013 I can open a PDF and copy the text including the spaces between words.

Martin Schröder
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Keks Dose
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1 Answers1

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This is needed for PDF/A compatibility, but also for accessibility. Accessible PDFs are supposed to be able to read out aloud by a screen reader software.

ndbd
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  • Can you give an example where the usage of \pdfinterwordspaceon makes a difference? Because I checked with lmodern as well as with Linux Libertine as fonts and there was no gain. – Keks Dose Aug 05 '14 at 17:52
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    Sorry, I cannot provide a minimal example. However the difference becomes noticable, if you want to create a tagged PDF, i.e. with babette schalitz "accessibility.sty" or related http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb30-2/tb95moore.pdf - When extracting the structual content and surrounding them with tags, there will be no spaces. See also here http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/124291/revisiting-producing-structured-pdfs-from-latex - Maybe it's already visible, if you open Acrobat Pro and try to see the tag structure there... – ndbd Aug 05 '14 at 18:29
  • @KeksDose An MWE is in http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/317586/30810 – bers Jul 01 '16 at 22:53