Let me try this again. It seems I shouldn't have broached this on another
thread, and for that I do apologize.

I'd like to ask about the possibility of Skim automatically trimming soft
hyphens when I create notes.

Using Skim 1.6.9, if I create a note for a passage in the PDF that includes
a hyphen at the line break, it still includes a soft hyphen (U+00AD) and a
space, and I have to trim each of these by hand. FWIW, the PDF was OCR'd
from scanned pages using the latest version of Adobe Acrobat.

I checked some other PDF readers and found that Adobe Acrobat Pro, FoxIt
Reader, and PDF Expert all trim out the soft hyphen, as well as the space,
while Skim and Preview do not.

It seems that if there are any soft hyphens (U+00AD) followed by a space in
a string copied from a PDF, these two characters can safely be trimmed out.
Regular hyphens in the PDFs I've checked are represented by U+002D, so
there should be no danger of losing them if Skim were to perform this
operation on strings.

These soft hyphens appear in Skim notes as zero-width characters, so to
clean up each note I must first place the cursor in front of the preceding
character, advance, and then hit delete twice. I.e., point, click, and then
hit three keys in a row to clear each one. Over time, this becomes rather
tedious.

I did a web search and found discussion on the interwebs about OCR'd text
and soft hyphens, with many people asking how they can fix this problem
with various apps. It seems to be a common issue, and — I submit — Acrobat
Pro, FoxIt Reader, and PDF Expert handle it properly while Skim does not.

Is this something that could be fixed?

Thanks again,

M.
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