Can I copy/paste Python code?

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Mon, 20 Jul 2015 19:49:56 -0700, ryguy7272 writes:
>I'm trying to copy some Python code from a PDF book that I'm reading.  I want to test out the code, and I can copy it, but when I paste it into the Shell, everything is all screwed up because of the indentation. Every time I paste in any kind of code, it seems like everything is immediately left-justified, and then nothing works.
>
>Any idea how to make this work easily?  Without re-typing hundreds of lines of code...
>
>Thanks to all.
>-- 
>https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

What I do is run my pdf file through pdftotext
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdftotext

and get a text version of the file.  If the file is large, sometimes I
just save the code I want to convert as separate pdf files and then
convert them.  Then I paste from the result, not the pdf.

You want to give the -layout and -nopgbrk options to pdftotext.

It's not perfect, but saves a lot of work.

Make sure your pdf is writing your python code in a fixed width font
before you try this, or it will be hopeless.  If your python code is
being displayed in the book in a variable width font, you will first have
to hack your pdf to stop doing this, and then run it through the tool.

Write back if you need more help.

Laura