How can I paste diacritical marks from .pdf to iTunes (or anywhere?)

I could paste "Maṅgalācaraṇa" from your post into iTunes without problem.

I have Mac OS X 10.6.8, my language is set to UK English and I use iTunes 10.4.1.

devananda108 said:

Hello simsaladimbamba,

thanks for the quick reply!

I also could paste the diacritics from this thread to iTunes, but I can't paste it from the .pdf.

I will attach the .pdf and, if you have time, please try to paste a word with diacritics into itunes lyrics section.

can U C the .pdf? Just in case here is a link to many free .pdfs which use these diacritics.

http://www.purebhakti.com/resources/ebooks-a-magazines-mainmenu-63/cat_view/53-bhakti-books-download/31-english.html

Sincerely,

devananda108

Click to expand...

The problem likely has to do with how the PDF was created and the fonts used. Probably wasn't done with unicode, and so iTunes has no way to interpret what you've copied.

Almost certain it's because of the way those PDFs were created; the ones on the linked site were locked, so I couldn't get into any detail, but they appear (as suggested) to have the fonts encoded weirdly so that essentially the letters you see in the PDF do not line up with the actual text that is being stored in it. Even within Acrobat Reader itself, if you copy and paste a word with diacritics into the "find" box, it looks wrong but highlights the correct word in the document.

PDF has some weirdness in general in the way it stores fonts and characters, but the fact that those were produced by an older (v7, ca 2006) version of Acrobat may also be a factor.

I've seen much more extreme examples where, for example, the text encoding is so weird you can't even select text to copy it, only individual letters, and/or times when the "letters" are essentially just vector graphics and aren't copy-pastable at all.

devananda108 said:

I guess I will have to find a .doc version (or make my own word version).

Click to expand...

If you're trying to recreate a lot of text (as opposed to just copy and paste a few things into iTunes, which would be faster to just retype), the easiest way would almost certainly be to copy and paste everything into Word or another text editor with mass find-replace capability, then go through each diacritic and copy whatever it turned into in the pasted text, then replace all occurrences of that character with the correct one typed in the "replace" field.

If there are only a dozen or two different possible diacritics in the text you're working from, this shouldn't take very long, and since each screwed up character should be unique, it should work.

If you're having trouble following me, for example:

The text "Śrī Śrīmad", when copied from one of those PDFs, appears as "Çré Çrémad" when pasted.

So if you copy and paste the entire book, then do a find and replace, replacing all occurrences (case sensitive) of "Ç" with "Ś", and "é" with "ī", that should work.

The only problem would be if one of the screwed up diacritics overlaps with a correct one elsewhere (for example, the document actually does contain "é" somewhere). You might be able to still make it work by being careful of the order in which you replace things (saving the one thatreplaces to é for last); otherwise, you'll have to skip through the document manually and only replace the correct occurrences, but if you know the words being used this probably won't take a huge amount of time, at least.