Document reader giving incorrect definitions in PDF

[Ben Carlsen]

I use Pleco on the iPhone, and I really enjoy the document reader feature, and it works most of the time, but I find that there are sometimes characters that I tap on for the definition, and it is clearly incorrect. The character that appears is not the one I am seeing in the text. I've only experienced this with PDFs so far. Is this a common problem? Is it a problem with the PDF I'm reading from?

I have an iPhone 5s, running the latest version of iOS 10.

Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

Yes - it means the embedded text in the PDF is wrong + doesn't match what's displayed on the screen. You can try opening the file with OCR instead (open it as an image file), though the interface isn't quite as nice with that.

 

[etm001]

I've only experienced this with PDFs so far.

I experienced this problem quite a while ago on macOS. Specifically, saving text files as PDFs using TextEdit. Although the characters look correct to the eye, the Unicode code points were wrong. I reported this to Apple and AFAIK they've done nothing to fix it.

 

[mikelove]

Might not even be on their end, actually - some PDF encoders don't encode Chinese correctly.