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Thanks for the clarifications.

Since a lot of PDFs are badly organized (and I wonder if some programs deliberately do that to make text extraction difficult), perhaps you could try to analyze the location of each token on the page and merge the ones that seem to belong together. That would be already 100x better than most of the free PDF->text converters out there.

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we are already close to do that but with a really slow parser (this one can even replace some text on the pdf). Our problem now is to understand if developers would rather have better text extraction or some other features like image extractions, etc.. Let us know what you would prefer.

Image extraction would be cool, but to me getting a readable block of text is more important.

Or even go the OCR approach !

All things considered that's pretty sad, though. A digital archive format that cannot reliably be read by machines, even if it contains just text.

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