evince copy adds a newline character

[Dan Kortschak]

Binary package hint: evince

Copy paste from a PDF document using evince results in the addition of a newline character to the end of the pasted text. This is possibly seen as a convenient feature, but in reality more often than not results in the need to delete the new line.

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS
Release: 10.04

evince 2.30.3-0ubuntu1.2 Document (postscript, pdf) viewer

Expected behaviour: Copying and pasting text from a PDF document should result in the text selected from the PDF being included in the new location without alteration.

Oberved behaviour: The pasted text is altered with the addition of a new line.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

thanks for the report, don't see that in oneiric, could you please test with it? thanks.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!

[Pacho Ramos (pacho)]

Any text selected and copied from a PDF document in evince, both via Ctrl-C and
the right-click menu, gets a newline appended at the end when pasted into
another program. Happens with every single pdf document that I have tried.

As discussed downstream in:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=402071

This seems to be caused by poppler-0.18.3 and can be fixed with the following patch:
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=402071#c5

[Albert Astals Cid (aacid)]

Are you saying this is new behaviour in poppler 0.18.3?
Have you verified your patch does not change pdftotext output?

[Pacho Ramos (pacho)]

From downstream report:

> Are you saying this is new behaviour in poppler 0.18.3?
No. As far as I can see the relevant part of TextOutputDev.cc is the same in
poppler-0.16.7. The behavior is new to me only because I solely used xpdf over
the last decade and even the 'popplerized' xpdf in gentoo is not affected (I
think it doesn't use poppler for text copying).
> Have you verified your patch does not change pdftotext output?
I just did a pdftotext of two pages of an pdf document with and without my
patch applied and diff says the output is identical. And I'm very confident
that this will always be ok as my change is in function
TextSelectionDumper::getText which as far as I can see is not used by
pdftotext.

[Albert Astals Cid (aacid)]

Not cairo backend related (TextSelectionDumper is only used by it but that doesn't mean it is cairo backend exclusive).

[Albert Astals Cid (aacid)]

Carlos since it mostly affects the glib frontend (it's the only user of the TextSelectionDumper stuff) i'll leave it for you

[Sebastian Golly (sg01)]

Confirmed in Oneiric

[Sebastian Golly (sg01)]

I can confim this bug in Oneiric.

evince 3.2.1-0ubuntu2.2

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 11.10
Release: 11.10

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Vadim Rutkovsky (roignac)]

Thank you for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it and make comments at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45955

[Sebastian Golly (sg01)]

According to https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=402071, this bug was fixed with poppler 0.18.4-r1 and accepted upstream. I can confirm it as fixed in Quantal (with poppler 0.20.4-0ubuntu1).