Comment 3 for bug 958634

Hello Andreas,

Thanks for your suggestions. Maybe this is a good place to note that we decided to wait with this until the recently proposed support for tagged PDF is merged in Poppler so that the text-selection process is actually backed by structural information and not done using heuristics. This is also the reason why the selected text isn't highlighted before copying, we don't "know" the exact relation between the selected rectangle and the text that is extracted since the heuristics are a one-way street. (There is also is support for extracting all text elements on a page and process them according to one's interface needs, but as I said we'll like to wait until this is actually backed by structural data.)

Concerning the way to activate this (assuming a current program version): Ctrl+C activates text-selection mode which ends with copying the text that is suspected to be displayed in the selected rectangle into the clipboard. So we do have a (text-)selection mode, even though it does work a little bit differently than in other viewers and is also used to select images. But this is something very different from being unintuitive. There also is a menu entry (Edit / Copy to clipboard) and hence one can add a tool bar button in the usual way. This is all described in the help, including the keyword for adding a button to the tool bar.

We also prefer a simple and clean interface as a default. We try to give users a lot of configurability, but we also expect them to take a few moments to adjust the program to their personal preferences.

Best regards, Adam.