How to avoid pdfbox appending separate words

Question

I'm making an application which allows searching in pdf's using apache Solr. I was having trouble finding certain terms in pdfs.

I noticed words in columns got appended.

Example

 Column1 | Column2
 stack   | overflow

Here the PdftextStripper would sometimes give me stackoverflow as extracted text. This would lead to bad tokinazation in solr which prevents you from finding the term. (Yes I know I can use wildcards but that doesn't work in phrase queries)

I have been looking at the sources to see what causes the problem. But it seems that the writePage method has to guess the spaces. I can't really change this since it seems very complex.

Are there any other solutions to get a good text extraction from a pdf with columns?

• Maybe some sort of conversion other program.
• Maybe patch for pdfbox.
• Yes I've seen similar question but they mostly handle the order of the extraction(which in my case doesn't matter that much).

Answer 1

I got the same problem while extracting text with PDFbox. I solved this issue by taking the position information of each character. I took x position and y position of each character. And implemented a simple logic to distinguish words. Before that my word delimitter was only the " "(space). I added one more logic that if the difference of the X position of two characters are beyond a certain value (this value will be your choice.) and it is in the same line, that is same y coordinate (Different y coordinate means certainly a new word), I treated them as a new word. With this logic I was able to solve problems with table content, new line etc.

This link will help you to get the position of characters from pdf with PDFbox.