Post #1808006

2026-03-08 11:27 UTC

@justvanrossum @mathieureguer I’m curious about that as well. Which PDF viewers? Perhaps it has to do with the Type flag (embedding bit)? In my mind, all production/final and design/friendly names should be arbitrary – what matters is the cmap and features.

Replies (1)

@justvanrossum@typo.social 2026-03-08 11:39

@frankrolf @mathieureguer It has nothing to do with the embedding bit. It has everything to do with that text inside PDF is fundamentally a sequence of *glyphs*, not characters, and that embedding the original text (as a sequence of unicode characters) was added much later, and many PDF *producers* apparently don't even bother. So to be able to do *some* form of text copying from PDFs (that do *not* embed the original text), the glyph sequence is interpreted in an attempt to *recreate* the original text. To do this, standardized glyph names are fundamental. (John Hudson can explain better than me why this approach is absolutely hopeless for all but the most simple scripts such as Latin.) So: *all* PDF viewers (that allow people to copy text) do this.

Open ##1808007