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Can't copy Japanese text from PDFs?

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Belton
Expert on Something
Posts: 752
Joined: June 16th, 2006 11:39 am

Postby Belton » September 12th, 2008 9:41 am

Unfortunately while the colorsync trick does work to allow selection and copying, whatever way the pdfs are encoded I end up with mojibake for everything including the English.
It's not a system issue as I can copy and paste perfectly well from other pdfs for instance The Daily Yomiuri's Pera Pera Penguin column.

I don't think JapanesePod want to specifically prevent copying. (I could be wrong) I think it's a by-product of how they generate their pdfs. Perhaps they are this way so they can be viewed on systems without Japanese fonts installed.

They should really investigate it and make them a bit more user accessible.
Or if their policy is that users shouldn't copy and paste out of the pdfs. (eg.for word lists ) it might be worth stating that as well.

parasitius
New in Town
Posts: 4
Joined: November 15th, 2007 4:57 am

if that's the case...

Postby parasitius » September 12th, 2008 10:16 am

they really need to publically state it. It's a real bummer to me cause I can actually hear clear enough to transcribe most of anything I need from the free mp3s anyway. It's just with the pdf's ... I thought "i'll be able to pull more info with less effort"

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Eran
JapanesePod101.com Team Member
Posts: 173
Joined: April 21st, 2006 12:19 pm

Postby Eran » September 13th, 2008 7:19 pm

Unfortunately, this is due to a technical limitation having to do with the way fonts are embedded in our dynamically generated PDF documents. Currently only a subset of the original font, containing only the glyphs used, is embedded in the output document. This embedded font contains only the minimum data needed to be embedded in a PDF document, and does not contain any codepage information. The PDF document contains indexes to the glyphs in the font instead of to encoded characters. While the document will be displayed correctly, the net effect of this is that searching, indexing, and cut-and-paste will not work properly.

We are searching for ways to overcome this, but at the moment have not found a solution that would work. One way to overcome this is to copy the text from our Line-By-Line transcripts in the Learning Center if you're a Premium member.

I am truly sorry for the inconvenience and apologize for the long-winded technical explanation.
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stevesayskanpai
Been Around a Bit
Posts: 44
Joined: October 29th, 2008 1:29 am

Postby stevesayskanpai » October 31st, 2008 1:47 pm

This post is the exact issue I am currently having.

The problem lies in the older pdf files on J-Pod 101. When I try to copy Japanese text from the newer ones in Foxit Reader to a memory program, it works fine. However when I try to copy from an older pdf it doesn't work- just symbols.

Is there any way to fix this?? Copying the text is fairly crucial to my use of the pdfs.

Neil53
Been Around a Bit
Posts: 44
Joined: May 10th, 2007 6:33 pm

newer pdfs

Postby Neil53 » October 31st, 2008 2:45 pm

Yes, there does not appear to be a problem with the new versions of the pdfs, which is why they made the change. Copy and paste works fine.

エイサー、良かったわねぇ。感動したわ。

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