I believe, dear Andrew, this is philosophical in nature. Lyx is based on Latex, so text is text, independently of how it looks in a PDF. Text changes its attributes depending on which environment it is included, information which I believe, would be impossible to get from a PDF via copy-paste.
Making some text as Bold-Italic-Numbered-Size 14-Roman can be done in Lyx, but it is much better to say that such text is in a Section environment, because when changes on the document style are made, you only have to make them once, and not throughout the document, at every instance of said format. Finger painting, what you need, is not the way to go in Lyx/Latex. It should be avoided like the plague. I hope you see the need for this approach. Regards. ------------------------------------------------- Julio Rojas [email protected] On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Andrew Parsloe <[email protected]>wrote: > When I copy text from a pdf to the clipboard and paste into Word 95, Open > Office or Abiword, the pasted text retains underlining, bolding and emphasis > (italics). When I paste into LyX these are lost. It would be a real > enhancement if LyX were to retain these styles. Is there a deep reason for > LyX's failure here (or the even deeper reason of lack of an interested > developer)? > > At present, I have some journals to edit. The publisher sent them to me as > pdf documents. I find I can copy a pdf and paste into Abiword, then save > from Abiword as a Latex document, open that in Notepad++, find-&-replace all > the extra spacing commands, and finally import that document into LyX. I get > there in the end, but it's a roundabout process. > > Andrew >
