PDF Print export - enable text select?

[toasty]

Hello!

The pdf print export function is really helpful for now but I would like to mention a possible improvement.

I recently had to share my work to someone who doesn’t use tropy and it occurred to us that we can’t search for (metadata) texts on the pdf print version of the tropy file. It appears that the photo and metadata are printed as an image on the pdf print export file.

A possible suggestion here is to enable the metadata to be printed over in text rather than image to allow researchers to search for metadata using usual pdf readers. I think this will be helpful for collaboration between researchers but are unable to access the same file on tropy etc.

Thanks!

[inukshuk]

Which operating system do you use? We’re relying on the platform’s print implementation and when I test this on Linux and macOS the text is saved as text in the PDF, not rasterized.

The main issue that I’m aware of with the printed PDFs is that the embedded images are not compressed and therefore you will want to optimize the PDF with specialized PDF tools before sharing them to reduce the file size. But text has not been an issue so far.

[inukshuk]

I spoke to soon, apparently there seems to be a Chromium issue on Windows and macOS that causes this (printing on Linux produces good PDFs for me though). We’ll take a look if we can workaround this by offering a second option that prints directly to PDF.

[toasty]

Thanks for the reply! Hopefully the print issue will be resolved but fyi I am using these at the moment:

[flachware]

@toasty this issue has already been addressed and the fix will be in the next release.

In case you have an urgent need for searchable PDFs you can add this file to your user-data folder (Help > Show User-Data Folder): style.css (76 Bytes).

[toasty]

Hello!

Thank you for the prompt fix & the file! It works well on my end.

[toasty]

Hi!

I have an enquiry about text select/ search function. I recently tried to print my collection as pdf but found that the texts are not searchable. May I know if this is not an enabled feature?

Please see the image attached for reference. I am currently using Tropy Version 1.11.1 (x64)

Thanks!

[flachware]

Hi,

we are looking into this. Did the search function in Tropy PDFs work for you at some point?

[toasty]

Hi,

Appreciate it! Last I recall it worked in late December.

[flachware]

Hi,

are you using macOS 12 (Monterey) by now?

[toasty]

Hi,

Yes, I am using macOS 12 (Monterey) V.12.3.1

[flachware]

Thanks, there seems to be a regression in Monterey’s PDFKit, we are working on a solution.

[toasty]

Thanks for the update. I look forward to hearing back again.

[flachware]

Hi, this issue has been fixed in the macOS 12.4 update.