PDFTextStripper - parsing incorrectness

[fungc]

Hello,

I am using PDFTextStripper, from the PDFbox library, to parse the text out of the pdf generated from html using openhtmltopdf.

Code for parsing:
final PDDocument document = PDDocument.load(pdfBytes);
final PDFTextStripper pdfTextStripper = new PDFTextStripper();
return pdfTextStripper.getText(document);

However, I am seeing a few problems:

1. Invisible, redundant text
   sometimes the PDF will have invisible text in front of the actual text.
   e.g.

HTML:
line1
line2
line3

PDF:
line1
line2 (<--- invisible)
line2
line3

This happens even when you just open the pdf and select / copy the text.

2. commas are places in the wrong position, when parsed
   commas show up correctly, but when parsed, they show in incorrect position
   e.g.
   HTML:
   hello, my name, is

PDF:
,,hello my name is

NOTE this does not happen when you open the pdf and select / copy the text.

3. Interestingly, the comma problem goes away when I parse like this
   final PDDocument document = PDDocument.load(pdfBytes);
   final PDFTextStripper pdfTextStripper = new PDFTextStripper();
   pdfTextStripper.setSortByPosition(true);
   return pdfTextStripper.getText(document);

However, all superscripts / subscripts then gets messed up on the output
e.g. receptiońs becomes receptións

Do you know why these happens?

Thank you!

[danfickle]

Number 1 may be a serious bug in this library, so I'd love to get the html to reproduce it.

Number 2 and 3, I'm not sure. Does this happen with other PDFs or just ones produced by this library?

[fungc]

Financier-Extraordinaire.pdf

I can't get you the html at the moment, but here is an output pdf
I think (1) has to do with paging, it always happens at the end of a page or at the beginning.

(2) (3) does not happen with other PDFs; I was testing with Apache FOP.

do you have an email we can chat?

[fungc]

Financier-Extraordinaire-long.pdf

Found another bug. For extra long strings, the end of the string becomes invisible but copy-able

[leonorader]

@fungc could you please provide html code for these issues?

[danfickle]

@fungc, I know it has been a while, but I was able to reproduce but only with ordered list items. Was that your experience?

Anyway, I will try to debug.