[PDFBOX-5411] PDFTextStripper could use text size in reconstruction

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 2.0.25, 3.0.0 PDFBox
• Component/s: Text extraction
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Lapo Luchini
• Created: 08/Apr/22 14:15
• Updated: 15/Apr/22 07:27

Description

When two texts are partially overlapping PDFTextStripper seems to return a mix simply based on "leftmost x coordinate of the glyph", which makes sense, but it could make use of glyph size to disambiguate "easy" cases like this one:

currently this is the first parameter of PDFTextStripper.writeString(String string, List<TextPosition> textPositions):

"T0510E09620_S368b3aT92-29fa -4Leef-80I5e-N53c23efE7979f"

I would of course hope for two calls:

"TEST LINE"
"051009620_368b3a92-29fa-4eef-805e-53c23ef7979f"