[reportlab-users] Reportlab text not searchable in Apple OSX Preview.App? but searchable in Acrobat and google-pdf viewer ?

[Tim Roberts]

Robin Becker wrote:

> ........

> It seems that preview is actually looking at the rendered image to

> find the characters.


I agree that this matches the symptoms, but as a programmer, how would
you do that?  The rendered image is just a matrix of pixels.  How would
you search for words, or even letters, for that matter?

When I encounter a bug, I always like to put myself in the mind of the
programmer to figure out what thinking would have led to the bug.  I'm
having a hard time coming up with an implementation that would trigger
this.  Maybe they are converting the PDF to some kind of intermediate
language (like a Windows EMF), where strings that aren't horizontal get
converted into a series of smaller strings that ARE horizontal, and they
are searching that intermediate format.  I'd call that "overthinking the
problem".

-- 
Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.