PDF question, those bothersome extra spaces., OR How search doesn't always work. Options

[blakkie]

I just noticed, those funky spaces that show up when you copy/paste from the PDF into, for example, a post here? Well they really are in the document, even though you can't see them.

I knew that the shapeshifters were mentioned in the Wolf Section (page 291), and i didn't remember them being anywhere else. However i wanted to check elsewhere for them. So i did a Search, nothing. WTF?? So i do a Find, still nothing. Then i get the inspiration, what if it has one of those funky spaces in it and that is screwing with the Search? Copy-Paste and yet, between the t and the e.

Turns out that there are actually three places where there is "shapeshifter" in the book, and they all have that same space at that position in the word.

So all you PDF pros out there, any idea where this is coming from? Is this an import issue, or was this possibly something that the original authoring software did. Either possibly for some odd typesetting reason? What are the possible feasible workarounds, if any, that i can use? Is this going to be consistant, whereever there is an "te" in a word there will be a space? Will there be some way for Fanpro/Adam to change this that doesn't involve copy and paste of the entire text into another program and proof reading it there?

[Aku]

well, if this was a scan we were talking about, i would blame the OCR software converting the images into text, now whether or not Adobe uses a similar alogrithm to make thier PDF's i don't know, but generally that combo of letters is bad, because to the image, it looks like the and and t are together, but it knows thats not a letter, and so it compensates by adding a space. Atleast, thats by off the cuff guess.

[Adam]

Without looking at the files and doing some testing, I'd bet that it's due to ligatures -- a lot of modern fonts actually have different characters to represent 'te' and other font combinations where spacing between the letters is non-standard, such as 'fi' and 'fl'.

[RunnerPaul]

Some word processors have an option that'll let you specify where you'd want a word to be hyphenated should it fall at the end of a line. This is especially helpful when you have complex, multi-column page layouts that have tables and oddly shaped artworks but you still want to conserve white-space and keep the pagecount controlled.

When the text is originally written, it's hard to forecast where the linebreaks will be. Combine that with the fact that there are some words you have to be careful hyphenating, and you have a recipe for potential disaster. (Just imagine if the word "therapist" were to be hyphenated as the-
rapist, and you can get the general idea).

To avert this disaster, the software lets you insert "virtual hyphens" into a word, so that you can specify things like "If the word shapeshifter falls at the end of a line, I want it to be hyphenated as shapeshift-er, and not shape-shifter". If the word doesn't fall at the end of the line in the final layout, the virtual hyphen isn't displayed.

That's my guess, anyway.