Just last week I was trying to extract text from a PDF and it had extra spaces between all the characters. Eventually in frustration I exported to PNG, made a new PDF, and OCRed it.
This looks quite useful but it appears it hasn’t been updated since 2010, and I’d imagine there’s been some advancements in this domain in the last decade. If anyone knows of similar tools for aligning and improving book scans, I’d love to hear of them. Thanks for this in any case!
For me, foxit reader solves this problem most of the time. Selecting in Sumatra I often get these annoying spaces, I guess Foxit filters them somehow...
i did this too. OCR is much better than text extraction from PDF
In some sense it's also the correct solution to the problem. PDFs are programs that generate screen/print output. Trying to find the text in the program will always fail sometimes. The only general solution is to process the output directly.