[Skim-app-users] Skim does not recognize highlighted text

[Bin Yin]

Hi,

I am encountering a problem with some PDF documents which were converted
from MOBI format.

The PDFs are searchable - I can select text and highlight/underline it from
Skim. But the problem is that those highlighted texts do not appear in the
Notes Pane as texts. They only show up as colors (yellow, etc) - see the
attached screenshot named 'highlight problem' (I am not sure if attachments
can be transmitted to the listserv, if not, please see the screenshot here:
http://tinypic.com/r/20kev7d/8 ).

However, inserted text notes show up in the Notes Pane just fine, as seen
in the screenshot. So it seems that Skim does not recognize the text in the
PDF as text, for some reason.

This is further confirmed by the fact that if I select a portion of the PDF
text from Skim, copy, and then try to paste it to a text processing program
such as Word or TextEdit, nothing gets copied/pasted. However, the same
problem does not occur when I do this with Adobe Acrobat for the same
document.

This has happened only to the PDFs which were converted from MOBI. I have
not encountered the same problem with normal PDF documents.

Anyone has any insight on why this is happening and how to solve it?

Thanks!!

[Christiaan Hofman]

Hi,
I am encountering a problem with some PDF documents which were converted from MOBI format.
The PDFs are searchable - I can select text and highlight/underline it from Skim. But the problem is that those highlighted texts do not appear in the Notes Pane as texts. They only show up as colors (yellow, etc) - see the attached screenshot named 'highlight problem' (I am not sure if attachments can be transmitted to the listserv, if not, please see the screenshot here: http://tinypic.com/r/20kev7d/8 <http://tinypic.com/r/20kev7d/8> ).
However, inserted text notes show up in the Notes Pane just fine, as seen in the screenshot. So it seems that Skim does not recognize the text in the PDF as text, for some reason.
This is further confirmed by the fact that if I select a portion of the PDF text from Skim, copy, and then try to paste it to a text processing program such as Word or TextEdit, nothing gets copied/pasted. However, the same problem does not occur when I do this with Adobe Acrobat for the same document.
This has happened only to the PDFs which were converted from MOBI. I have not encountered the same problem with normal PDF documents.
Anyone has any insight on why this is happening and how to solve it?
Thanks!!
<highlight problems.png>———————————————————————————————————————

Skim just gets the text from Apple’s PDFKit. So if you see that Skim does not get that text, it must mean that PDFKit does not give us any. That does happen for some PDFs, especially with OCR’d documents. There is nothing we can do about that, unfortunately. So it’s really an Apple bug that they need to fix.

Christiaan