Jan David Hauck
2016-05-19 08:04:23 UTC
This is not directly a question about Skim, but it seems to me that the
community of Skim users would be a good place to inquire about this issue,
since we're all at the mercy of the way PDFKit handles PDFs on the Mac â my
apologies for stretching the meaning of "discussions about Skim" a bit.
I'm having multiple issues with the ways ligatures and some other special
characters are "read" (or rather *not *read) from some PDFs by PDFKit. It
doesn't matter whether the document is produced by LaTeX, Pages, or through
some OCR mechanism (specifically Adobe's ClearScan). Ligatures like fi or
ft show up as blank when copying text from the PDF. This is especially
annoying for creating Skim highlights, since one has to manually fill in
all the missing ligatures in the note.
Are there others who have experienced these problems?
Other PDF viewers like Acrobat do read most of them correctly (not all of
them) and it further depends on at least two more factors: the font in the
pdf and also, in the case of LaTeX, the engine through which the PDF is
produced.
Is there anyone knowledgeable about PDFs and font encodings who would be
able to explain to me what the exact problem is?
Is it only PDFKit that screws things up, or does that hint at a problem
with the PDFs themselves? Or with the fonts used? Or all of the above?
I have posed a question on a TeX forum here
<http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/307427/fix-encoding-for-ligatures-of-fonts-in-xetex-lualatex-specifically-for-minion?lq=1>
with
a more detailed explanation of my specific issues. Interestingly people
there were not able to reproduce the problem â even on a Mac. Could it be
something specific to a certain version/installation of PDFKit?
Anyone able to enlighten me here? Much appreciated!
community of Skim users would be a good place to inquire about this issue,
since we're all at the mercy of the way PDFKit handles PDFs on the Mac â my
apologies for stretching the meaning of "discussions about Skim" a bit.
I'm having multiple issues with the ways ligatures and some other special
characters are "read" (or rather *not *read) from some PDFs by PDFKit. It
doesn't matter whether the document is produced by LaTeX, Pages, or through
some OCR mechanism (specifically Adobe's ClearScan). Ligatures like fi or
ft show up as blank when copying text from the PDF. This is especially
annoying for creating Skim highlights, since one has to manually fill in
all the missing ligatures in the note.
Are there others who have experienced these problems?
Other PDF viewers like Acrobat do read most of them correctly (not all of
them) and it further depends on at least two more factors: the font in the
pdf and also, in the case of LaTeX, the engine through which the PDF is
produced.
Is there anyone knowledgeable about PDFs and font encodings who would be
able to explain to me what the exact problem is?
Is it only PDFKit that screws things up, or does that hint at a problem
with the PDFs themselves? Or with the fonts used? Or all of the above?
I have posed a question on a TeX forum here
<http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/307427/fix-encoding-for-ligatures-of-fonts-in-xetex-lualatex-specifically-for-minion?lq=1>
with
a more detailed explanation of my specific issues. Interestingly people
there were not able to reproduce the problem â even on a Mac. Could it be
something specific to a certain version/installation of PDFKit?
Anyone able to enlighten me here? Much appreciated!