[pdftex] pdflatex adds spaces between letters, which makes search impossible

[Karl Berry]

Hi Olivier,

    [sorry, I couldn't find a website where I could search through the past 

The list archives are at https://tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/
but admittedly it is not easy to search, and general web searches are
more likely to be productive (tex.stackexchange.com, etc.). Anyway,
thanks for trying.

    $ mutool draw -F txt test.pdf | head -1
    Lor e m

What version of mutools? With the version I get from
http://packages.psychotic.ninja/7/base/x86_64/RPMS/psychotic-release-1.0.0-1.el7.psychotic.noarch.rpm
which seems to be 1.10a (from running strings on the binary; apparently
they don't support --help or --version, etc.), it seems to work for me:

$ mutool draw -F txt try.pdf | head -1
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.Ut purus elit,

The lack of a space at the end of the sentence (after "elit.") seems
like another problem, which pdftotext also does not have.

It's surprising that the results are different for lm and cm. You could
further simplify by trying the plain tex file:
  \nopagenumbers \font\tenrm=ec-lmr10 \tenrm Lorem. There.\end
(It also works for me, even gets the sentence space right.)

At any rate, I can't think of anything significant that has changed wrt
this output for many years, and it's there has been no outpouring of bug
reports from everyone in the world about such spurious spaces. Thus I
have to suggest reporting to mupdf, if it's still happening in their
latest release. --best, karl.