[PDFBOX-600] PDFBox performance issue: PDFTextStripper performance tweak

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 0.8.0-incubator
• Fix Version/s: 1.0.0
• Component/s: Text extraction
• Environment: All
• Assignee: Jukka Zitting
• Reporter: Mel Martinez
• Created: 14/Jan/10 20:38
• Updated: 22/Feb/10 18:28
• Resolved: 14/Jan/10 23:37

Description

During text extraction, the PDFTextStripper needs to calculate textposition proximities in order to determine if text elements are overlapping either vertically or horizontally.

As part of this, the PDFTextStripper.within(float first, float second, float variance) method is used.

The current (0.8.0) version of this method uses the following test: second > first - variance && second < first + variance

This is accurate, but slower in my test documents than if you flip the test order: second < first + variance && second > first - variance

This is because the second test fails out faster on left-to-right text. I believe that should be the default case.

Please change the PDFTextStripper.within() method to use the second form of the test. I.E. to:

private boolean within( float first, float second, float variance )

{ return second < first + variance && second > first - variance; }

Thanks!