[PDFBOX-956] Poor text extraction performance in PDFTextStripper.java

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 1.4.0
• Fix Version/s: 1.7.0
• Component/s: Text extraction
• Assignee: Andreas Lehmkühler
• Reporter: Kevin Jackson
• Created: 05/Feb/11 02:35
• Updated: 29/May/12 16:21
• Resolved: 09/Nov/11 07:13

Description

The worst case performance of the suppressDuplicateOverlappingText logic in processTextPosition is O(n^2).
The patch is to use a TreeMap to achieve O(N log N) performance.
The example PDF took over 2 hours to extract the text before this patch and less than 10 minute after.

BTW: The extracted text is also quite different compared to Adobe Reader. Not sure which is correct but for this document it doesn't matter.

Issue Links

• is required by: PDFBOX-895 Infinite recursion when trying to extract text from specific types of PDFs