Text copied from generated PDF is reversed

[jloveridge]

Original text from the markdown file:

This token must be used as the password portion of the HTTP basic authentication header.

Pasted text after copying it from the generated PDF:

.redaeh noitacitnehtua cisab PTTH eht fo noitrop drowssap eht sa desu eb tsum nekot sihT

md2pdf: 2.6.2
Platform: macOS 10.14.4
node: 10.15.0

[simonhaenisch]

😂 best bug report yet.

Just pasting this from a pdf I just converted:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit.

I. e., can't reproduce on macOS 10.14.3 with node 11.13.0 and md2pdf 2.6.4 (opened the PDF in Preview.app).

I'd be keen to know what actually causes this though, never seen it before 🤓 Maybe someone installed you a copy-paste reverser as a hoax?

[jonathanj]

I'm having the same issue. The output PDF looks fine (although the selection indicator looks weird) but the text copied to the clipboard is reversed. The document is in English, but this happens on a basic document:

# Testing

Hello world

I found these related issues:

• [Issue] PDF Reverse Words puppeteer/puppeteer#2206
• https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/29061484?hl=en

This unfortunately dramatically reduces the value of converting my documents to PDF.

md-to-pdf: 2.8.2
node: 10.19.0
Platform: macOS 10.15.3

[simonhaenisch]

Ok thanks for the info... seems to be an issue with custom fonts and how they are embedded in the pdf.

This unfortunately dramatically reduces the value of converting my documents to PDF.

Sorry but there's nothing I can do about this (as for everyone, my time is limited). This tool merely composes different tools to make it easier to generate PDFs from markdown, but I can't offer any support for those tools. It's an upstream issue and I'm keeping the dependencies up-to-date so once it's fixed, it should work with md-to-pdf as well.

You could use the --as-html flag to convert it to html instead, and then you could see whether there's another way of converting that to PDF that doesn't have the issue. Maybe there's another browser that allows to print to PDF programmatically 🤷🏻‍♂️

[jonathanj]

I discovered that the cause of this issue (in my case) was indeed the use of a custom font. I don't know if the font itself has an issue or if it's any non-system font, but using a system font (like "Helvetica Neue" on macOS) made this issue go away.