1513120 - unable to select text of PG&E bill in PDF viewer

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: PDF Viewer, defect, P3)

Description

[skierpage]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:65.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0

Steps to reproduce:

I went to pge.com and viewed my PG&E electric utility bill at Your Account > Your Bill > View and Pay Your Bill > View Current Bill (PDF), which triggered a download save.
I used File > Open to open the pdf file in Firefox.
I tried to select my account number to copy it.


Actual results:

The bill previews fine, but unlike most PDF documents I view in Firefox the mouse cursor doesn't change to an I-beam anywhere and I can't select any text. Yet in e.g. chromium-browser and the Okular viewer for Linux I can select any text on the page and copy the characters; likewise the Linux Poppler utilities pdftotext and pdftohtml extract the text fine.


Expected results:

Text in Firefox's PDF viewer is usually selectable, and this document's text is selectable in other tools.

Additional Details:

There are no errors in the browser JavaScript console. It prints
  PDF 30fd510cf4054bcffcacca871cdc1827 [1.2 CrawfordTech PDF Driver Version 4.2 32 Bit Build ID 5163 on February 29, 2016 at 20:01:07 / PRO HLCAPI] (PDF.js: 2.1.86)
pdfinfo reports the file is PDF version 1.2m creator PRO HLCAPI, and is not encrypted, nor optimized, nor using JavaScript.

So maybe the glitch occurs with other PDF documents generated by this PDF Driver.

I don't want to upload my personal billing details as a public attachment; maybe there's a way I can edit the PDF down to one page and blank out my account information, but in the meantime any home-owning Mozilla engineer or supporter in Northern California can probably reproduce the bug with her PG&E bill.

Comment 1

[Brendan Dahl [:bdahl]]

Attachment: bug1513120_reduced.pdf

Here's a reduced test case, without any account info. It appears the text is there as I can see it when I inspect the DOM but the scaling of the font is wrong.

Jonas,
I think you were looking at some text layer stuff recently, maybe you have some thoughts on a fix?