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Subject:Re: Summary: Create PDF with spaces intact? From:Mike Stockman <mstockman -at- gmail -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Fri, 9 Jul 2010 09:42:10 -0400
On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 8:03 AM, <barbphilbrick -at- caslonsvcs -dot- com> wrote:
> Sounds like no one else has found a solution to this.
>
> The basic problem is that to compress the files, the PDF identifies a fixed
> starting point for a line of text and gets rid of leading spaces. So unless
> we can fool it into thinking our spaces aren't really spaces, users can't
> copy spaces out of the PDFs.
>
> Thanks to Paul Goble for the link to detail on this at
> <
>http://www.pdf-tools.com/public/downloads/whitepapers/whitepaper-pdfprimer.
> pdf<http://www.pdf-tools.com/public/downloads/whitepapers/whitepaper-pdfprimer.%0Apdf>
> >.
>
> For us, this is a style issue (our code doesn't require indents).
>
> But if anyone has found a solution, we would be interested.
>
I did play around with this and, like you, failed to find any solution. But
I think the problem is that even if you did find some invisible characters
that would pass through to the PDF and look like indenting, any user copying
the code would also get those hidden characters, and that would cause
errors.
The only semi-useful suggestion I can think of is to warn the users up front
that copying from the PDFs will look bad but work fine, and provide a short
discussion of pretty-printing utilities or features in common code editors
that make the results more readable.
Good luck,
Mike
--
Mike Stockman
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