[PDFBOX-2548] Problems with character extraction (fi ligature)

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Not A Problem
• Affects Version/s: 1.8.7
• Component/s: Text extraction
• Environment: Windows7Professional JavaSE8 EclipseKepler
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Matthias Bösinger
• Created: 08/Dec/14 16:21
• Updated: 09/Dec/14 11:45
• Resolved: 09/Dec/14 11:45

Description

favorite

I have a pdf document whose font type is OpenType (Garamond OpenType). So the pdfBox text extraction can also extract special characters (for example small capital lettres), which caused problems when the underlying font has been a simple Type1 font.

However, the text extraction now causes another type of problem. In my case, when the charater sequences "fi" or "fl" occur in the text, the PDFTextStripper#getText(PDDocument doc) extracts them as single characters: 'fi' and 'fl' and sets a space character on their right side.

(Surprisingly, if I access the list of characters of a page via the charactersByArticle field of PDFTextStripper / via the PDFTextStripper#processText(TextPosition pos) method, the same characters show up as 'normal-single' characters f i / f l).

My assumption is that the advantage of the underlying OpenFont type turns into this particular disadvantage, because the PDFTextStripper recognizes the character sequence f i / f l as special charcters fi / fl (- what might have to do with the fact, that the getText() method calculates things like whitespace characters by distances / positional placements).

Background: The given document is a wordbook text with very dense printed text.

see this link for code and output:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27333499/problems-with-extracting-opentypefont-text-using-pdfbox

My question: is there anything what I can do to avoid this problem?

thanks in advance ...