770446 - Empty/blank space in PDF is the page beginning for selection

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: PDF Viewer, defect, P3)

Description

[[:Aleksej]]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:16.0) Gecko/16.0 Firefox/16.0
16.0a1 (2012-07-02)

When selecting content in the PDF viewer, empty areas (e.g. between paragraphs) are considered to be at top of the page, which affects the selection if its beginning or end is there.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Open attachment 635667 [details] in Firefox.
2. Select text from the middle of a paragraph (or any point which is a part of it) to the middle of a paragraph.
--> Visibly, text between the points is selected.
3. Select text from the middle of a paragraph to blank space (e.g. between the title and the table, or on the right), or the other way around.
--> Selection is from the top of the page to the middle of the paragraph.

The result of Step 3 is unintuitive and probably confusing.

Behaviour of other programs:
* Evince 3.4.0 uses the line at the same height.
* Okular 0.13.3 of KDE 4.8.3 (4.8.3) uses a rectangle for selection, and doesn’t seem to do anything surprising.

Comment 1

[Srishti]

Hi I am interested in working on this bug, can anyone guide me to do it?

Comment 4

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

The PDF in bug 911087 makes this much easier to understand.

Comment 5

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Attachment: program.pdf

Attaching the PDF from bug 911087 in case it disappears from the web.

Comment 8

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 3 duplicates.
:calixte, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 9

[mrmikel]

I agree about increasing the severity level. In my use case, I received a copy of an invoice with the tracking number and selected the tracking number by dragging the mouse to highlight. This left off the last two numbers and I was unable to track the package being sent to me of repair parts. It took three days of trying it until I stumbled on to seeing that a double click selected an area past what dragging had selected.

I believe this is not an uncommon use case since I might also copy a purchase order number off a PDF so I could put it on an invoice I am sending out.

PDFs have replaced faxes for me and likely many others.

Comment 10

[Calixte Denizet (:calixte)]

It's a painful bug but according to the docs:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/UserGuide/BugFields#bug_severity
it's a S3.