Bug 1274535 - 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
Summary: Copy and paste of a table from a pdf file to a text file produces a new line...
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: firefox
Version: 22
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Gecko Maintainer
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2015-10-22 22:50 UTC by Peter H. Jones
Modified: 2015-11-09 13:19 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2015-11-09 13:19:12 UTC
Type: Bug
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

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).


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