PDF Exports Without Character Spacing for Blank Spaces

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mdover

One issue is what I call "issue wide" proofing.  See below how I'm doing it now, using Scribus, exported PDF, opening in Foxit Advanced PDF reader, saving as RTF.  Then I can do spell check and various other searches in Word and fix in Scribus.  But the problem is that the saved PDF doesn't retain spacing.  Two spaces is like one space.  (I'm referring to character spacing not line spacing).  It forwards character at a time using right arrow through text, but then it "skips" two characters, for instance, at end of sentence.  This makes it impossible to search for incorrect spacing.  Can you think of a way to save a PDF or RTF that would retain spacing?

Example files below; there are 2 spaces after nearly every sentence, but as you can see, only one space is found in the pdf or rtf if you were to search for .| where | is a space. You won't find any .|| at all.  This isn't a problem in Scribus, it has something to do with PDFs in general.  I've been told Foxit can deal with it, but obviously not if its raw material already has the spaces removed.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9938989/Reflections/latestproof.pdf
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9938989/Reflections/latestproof.rtf

Neither version properly retains the ability to search for spacing, such as .|| where | is a space.  PDF files typically treat || as | although they accurately "show" the distance between words, after sentences, etc..  I'm working on a workaround on that, but did spacing checks within Scribus.

Searching the web for this, found this at StackOverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12101549/2-spaces-in-a-pdf-file-are-rendered-as-a-single-space


Mike