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

[Robin Becker]

Tim Roberts wrote:

> 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".

> 

I saw some related Preview search problems on one of the tex lists when I was 
googling. They seemed to be recommending the use of standard fonts and the like 
to improve searchablity; that would come down to some kind of OCR like weakness. 
Mac people: are gifs searchable?
-- 
Robin Becker