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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

Then I would very much appreciate if you would enlighten me. I'm serious, I would love nothing more than for you to prove your point, teach me something, and win an internet argument. Once rendered, do any of the rendering engines have e.g. a selectable or accessible text? Poppler didn't, neither did some Java library that I tried.

For me, learning something new is very much worth losing the internet argument!

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I have explained the details in other comments, have a look. But you can start by looking at pdftotext from Poppler, it is ready to go for 60-70% of cases with -layout flag, with bbox-layout you get even more details.

Thank you. Even with box layout one can not even know that there is a coherent word or phrase to extract, without visually inspecting the PDF beforehand. I've been there, fighting with it right in the CLI and finding that there is no way to even progress to a script.

The advantage of the OCR method is that it effectively performs that visual inspection. That's why it is preferable for PDFs of disparate origin.

What kind of semantics can you infer from the text of OCRing a bitmap that you can't infer from the text generated directly from the PDF? Is it the lack of OCR mistakes? The hallucinations? Or something else?

In the cases that I've seen, the PDF software does not generate text strings. It generates individual letters. It is up to any application to try to figure out how those individual letters relate to one another.

Did you even read my comment? The "application" is called pdftotext, and instead of putting the individual letters on a bitmap, it puts them in a string literal.

I do not understand why you insist on being polemic to win an internet argument, when I'm giving you all the tools to win the internet argument by virtue of being correct.

I did read your comment, because my intention here is to learn. I already described how tools such as pdftotext do not produce strings when each letter is positioned independently. I even gave an example of a few replies up.

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