Bug 1274535

Summary:	Copy and paste of a table from a pdf file to a text file produces a new line at each column instead of only at each line break
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Peter H. Jones <jones.peter.busi>
Component:	firefox	Assignee:	Gecko Maintainer <gecko-bugs-nobody>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	22	CC:	gecko-bugs-nobody, jhorak, pjasicek
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2015-11-09 13:19:12 UTC	Type:	Bug
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Peter H. Jones 2015-10-22 22:50:12 UTC

Description of problem:
I tried to copy and paste a table in a PDF file to a text file. Each column break and each new row produced a new line in the text file, using vi.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
firefox-41.0.2

How reproducible:
Every time

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Access the PDF at http://www.hamiltonbeach.ca/media/contact/Service_Centres_Canada.pdf .
2. Select All and Copy.
3. Paste to a vi editing session.

Actual results:
Each column break and each line break show as a line break when pasting.

Expected results:
Column breaks should paste as tabs, line breaks as newlines, and page breaks (none in this example) as form-feeds.

Additional info:

Downloading and using evince to to generate the copy caused the copy to run down each columen.

I dndn't try using libreoffice to read the PDF. Maybe that would be better. But I would really like to avoid having do download a whole potentially-large file to extract just a small portion

Perhaps there's an firefox add-on or an attachment to help with this problem.

Comment 1 Jan Horak 2015-11-09 13:19:12 UTC

I'm afraid that this particular pdf document is not well structured, you can try to use Adobe Reader to obtain the correct table. I've tried libreoffice and evince and also have no success (even worse results).