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ebook readers let user select only a single word in the most PDF documents. However, when I try to select a word in a PDF generated with pdflatex (and also with latex), the ereader (i.e. sony prs600) selects the entire sentence between the 2 punctuation marks.

The same problem was also discussed in the following two links:

  1. Force pdflatex to create one box per word
  2. Selection in PDF files

These discussions are a little bit old. Therefore, I wanted to learn if recently any new progress has been made about this problem. It seems creating tagged PDFs is a solution for this. Does any recent TeX release have this tagging property?

Furthermore, I noticed that any PDF viewer (e.g. evince, adobe etc.) can select a single word for any document generated with pdflatex. Does anyone have any idea about why the ebook readers need tagged PDFs to select a single word in the whole documents?

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Which font encoding are you using? does it behave any differently with \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}? – ArTourter Jun 29 '12 at 22:39
Changing the font encoding does not change the behavior. – user460153 Jun 29 '12 at 23:55
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It's said that ConTeXt can create tagged PDF. – Martin Schröder Jun 30 '12 at 16:04
I know that PDFs must be tagged so that they can be reflowed. However, I am still not convinced that tagging is necessary for selecting the individual words. It seems there are some problems (or rather incompatibilities) with pdflatex's the handling of white space characters. I still believe that there should be some quick and dirty fix for this problem which does not require tagging. – user460153 Jul 1 '12 at 19:31

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