this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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Have you ever tried to look under the hood and interact with a pdf programmatically? I assure you it only gets worse.
A while ago I tried to write a small script to scrape data out of some account statements that my idiot bank only made available in pdf format. As far as I could tell, the file was just a list of tiny chunks of text along with sets of x/y coordinates specifying where each one should be placed on the page. Answering seemingly simple questions like "are these two words on the same line?" Involved comparing raw y-coordinates because the file had no concept of a "line of text", and even spaces between words were often simulated by bumping the x-coordinate over by a few pixels instead of using an actual space character.
I suspect those files were generated by a particularly bad piece of software, and a more competent one could probably do much better, but knowing that its even possible to create a file that cursed is still infuriating to me.
Yup that's how PDFs are. I think the accessibility option one might have something (never tried parsing that).
Plus if you're working with language with diacritics then it's even worse because you can't even compare the coordinates properly, specially if some of them go beyond the previous characters. Not having the space combined with that meant it was really hard to determine the text, and it saves glyph from the font instead of character info too.
Probably Crystal Reports. It's cursed.
Yeah, don't try to hand-parse a raw PDF. You're better off rendering it and running OCR on the image in most cases. Only exception I know of is if you generated it with LaTeX.
Yes, I have looked at evil and I have not been back.