[PDFBOX-4293] PDFBox does not align "columns" properly

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Blocker
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Affects Version/s: 2.0.11
• Component/s: Text extraction
• Environment: Windows 7 64
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Rens Huizenga
• Created: 20/Aug/18 09:06
• Updated: 10/Sep/18 07:26
• Resolved: 30/Aug/18 17:10

Description

 I have to convert Pdf's to database data. I developed a parser that reads .txt files. The original data is available in PDFs only . Therefore .txt files will have to be created by Tika converting the PDF's to .txt. After conversion I recognise an alignment issue with the .txt data compared to the columns in the PDF. On the TIKA website I read that I need to check if the problems also occurs in PDFBox, so I checked for that. PDFBox has the same issue.

These lines of PDF data:
a b c d e
a b c d e

are both presented as
a b c d e

in the text file, causing for example numbers to be presented in the wrong "column".

Unfortunately I cannot share busniess documents, but i have created an example in Excel, saved it as PDF and converted it to .txt. See attachments.

In addition I converted the testset online with Convertio.co. Their results is as expected, with enough spaces between the words/numbers to recognise the column.