[Scribus] How to recover/reformat faulty pdfs

[Peter Linnell]

On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 16:38, Oleksandr Moskalenko wrote:
> This is not scribus related. I just thought that among the many
> knowledgeable people on this list someone should be able to suggest a
> solution to the following problem. Some pdfs of the scientific articles
> that I am annotating seem to be broken. I can't either select text or
> convert the pdfs to text. I tried latest xpdf and acroread and the usual
> pdftotext and pdf2ps, then ps2ascii. Nothing works. I checked "Document
> security" and there were no restrictions on copying text in those pdfs.
> It is really irritating to have to retype abstracts when I could just
> copy/paste. I'm really looking for a Linux solution, of course, as you
> have already guessed from the description of tools I tried to use.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Alex.
> 
> --
> The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.
>                                    -- Chaucer
> Life's not fair, but the root password helps.
>                                       -- BOFH
Alex,

You should be aware of a couple of things:

1. Acro Reader 5.0.x on Linux or the Window Managers ( i can't tell
which) have a bug where selecting text seems like it does not work. That
is as you paint the selection, no highlight appears. However, the text
is selected.  This happens on both KDE with kwin and Gnome with metacity
as the Window manager. 

Now, the weird part is I just upgraded KDE to the 3.2 beta on Fedora-1
(its sweet btw). Now the highlighting works.

2. I am guessing, but those documents are created via Latex and add-ons.
It maybe that something to do with the fonts. While Latex exported PDF's
will print extremely well, the type of fonts used in Latex are not
commonly used in other applications. Tex has its own set of fonts, which
are unique to the application. That could be where the trouble lies.

Please feel free to send me a sample PDF. I have a number of specialist
PDF tools at my disposal.

Peter