[OS X TeX] PDF readers and copy/pasting

Richard Seguin riseguin at earthlink.net
Tue Jun 2 13:23:37 EDT 2015


I just tried copy and pasting equations from Skim, Preview, and Adobe Reader displays of a LaTeX document to a Pages document, and all three of them produce different results. Although none of them look good, the copy from Skim looks best. It’s not clear why I get different results from Skim and Preview since they supposedly use the same PDFKit.

I can also copy some math environment text from Skim, place it into the search box in Skim's sidebar, and it actually finds most if not all instances of that string. When you paste a copy into Preview, TeXShop, and Reader searches you don’t find anything. Of course the weakness of doing a search like this is the possibility that you’ve placed something like a small spacer in an equation in one place but not another, and one will be found but the other not.

Richard Seguin


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