(oops, replied on launchpad, not sure if Carlos reads there. Repeating for fdo)
Carlos: it isn't a regression that lines outside a rectangle formed by the start and endpoints are included, it's the intent. Consider selecting in a document with two columns, starting in the 1st column 2/3 down the page, ending in the 2nd column 1/3 down the page. In this case, the correct selection consists entirely of lines that lie outside the rectangle formed by the start and endpoints (ie, the bottom 1/3 of the 1st column and the top 1/3 of the 2nd column). The motivation for this patch was that text selection by rectangles is fundamentally wrong. The correct approach is to reconstruct the reading order of text; then from two points on the page, find the nearest insertion points (where an edit cursor would go); swap the insertion points if necessary; then return the characters between them. The difficulties lie in inferring the reading order, and determining what 'nearest insertion point' means. Clicking inside a word, the nearest insertion point is obvious; it's the nearest character boundary. Click in a blank area, and it's less clear. In Breuel's algorithms that I used for determining reading order, there is something that helps here. There, line width is determined by expanding the line left and right to fit the column it contains. So the line 'box' contains the initial indent if it is the first line of a paragraph, or the trailing space in the last line; or the ragged space for left- or right- justified text. Poppler doesn't have columns as such, but blocks instead, and as I recall the line boxes are the tight bounding box of the words contained in the line. So we can try to determine insertion point by looking for the nearest block (horizontally and vertically), then the nearest line (vertically ONLY, so that we ignore indents/ragged space), then nearest character (horizontally). I mean these to be three different comparisons, discarding blocks, line and character candidates at each stage, not some single distance you sum up. The upshot would be that clicking in blank areas of a line that lie within its block's bounding box - or even nearby - will choose that line, not the one above or below. (It's been ages since I looked at the poppler code, I can't remember if this heuristic is what the patches do already) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to the bug report. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/33288 Title: Evince doesn't handle columns properly To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/poppler/+bug/33288/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
