Really often when I copy text from a pdf file and insert into Writer I get “Non-breaking spaces” instead of the normal spaces. This is extremely annoying, my current fix is to copy that gray space and then use the “Find & Replace”.
I was wondering if it is possible to autocorrect it directly when I insert it into my documents, so I won’t ever see that annoying gray space?
[UPDATE]
Here’s an example PDF file: pdf
Here’s the output when using the paste opportunities:
Could you please attach such an pdf-file to your question to allow testing?
@jeggi - You are on Windows, aren’t you?
I would use Paste Special > Unformated text.
If I paste the unformatted text copied from the Firefox built-in viewer I (surprising for me!) don’t get non-breaking spaces but wrong “new paragraph” occurrences.Remarkable: From the same viewer copying part of the OASIS odf document (in pdf) I also get wrong paragraph marks despite the fact that that pdf file is supposed to be created from the odt file (with LibreOffice?). It’s a puzzle with viewers and the clipboard in the center, as I suppose.
What are you using for viewing your PDFs, and doing the “copy” operation?
At the moment, I’m on an old maching running Linux Mint 13 (LTS/Xfce; built on Ubuntu 12.04), with LibO Version: 4.4.1.2 / Build ID: 40m0(Build:2). Here are the results I get with your PDF, but using three different PDF readers:
All are straight copy-paste, with no interventions. I only get your result with qpdfview.
Also the Foxit Reader does not produce the problem when pasting a therefrom copied text into a Writer document. Styles are simply ignored…Pasting the text copied from the built-in pdf viewer of Firefox does show the effect and some issues in addition, even inserting paragraph marks. I should conclude: We are experiencing a problem with regard to the source application and, maybe, to the clipboard. How Writer takes part in it (and if at all) isn’t clear.
I’m using the Google Chrome pdf reader, don’t really know which one that is. And I’m on Linux Mint 17.1. But I think this also happens on Windows 8 if copying from Chome pdf reader and directly into Writer