GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 408299
Search should optionally be whitespace insensitive
Last modified: 2013-11-18 19:25:27 UTC
When searching a PDF document for a particular phrase containing spaces (as opposed to a single keyword), search will not match occurances of that phrase if they occur in a paragraph and have been laid out with a line break in the middle of the phrase. This behavior is sometimes desired. However, I would like an option to search where all whitespace is considered equivalent. This would be useful for normal paragraphs-of-text type traditional documents. Perhaps this mode should be default, even. For example, if my document contains: "around the\nbend" where \n is a line break, and my search text is "around the bend", I would like search to match in this case. Basically, if spaces in the search string would be treated as a multiline regex \s character class, that should do it. I don't know if this is part of the underlying document engines or evince proper, so I'm filing it under evince.
I think that regex search might be much easier to implement and more useful (since it would be useful for other purposes). Any takers?
Regex search would be fantabulous, but whitespaces should be treated the same should by default. This is because by far most often people read and search prose.
I guess that whitespaces should be treated the same way than in regexp searches, because otherwise it might be confusing and potentially misleading for users. Regexp search should be an alternative to the standard search. But this is my personal opinion.
You mean standard search should ignore line breaks, but regexp search should not. This is what I think too.
That seems good to me. Regular non-tech searchers get all whitespace treated as equal, but if you want to be advanced and do a regex search, you know about whitespace and want your regex to work just as it would in a programming language.
This looks like a bug with the PDF backend. Could you please follow these instructions to help get this bug fixed. Thank You. http://live.gnome.org/Evince/PopplerBugs#poppler
*** Bug 451142 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
OK, filed a bug with the PDF backend. http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11381