Quote:
Originally Posted by Difflugia
I've attached two-page excerpts from three commercial PDF books that I've bought. You can decide whether or not they invalidate what you've said. In case anyone cares, I used The PDF Toolkit to extract pages from the larger documents.
I'll note that PDF fonts are not fixed. For example, the first page of the "Text only.pdf" file that I linked contains the Greek phrase, ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. If I copy/paste that phrase, I get something far different: o" yi"oÁq toyÄ a! nurwpoy. That also happens in some English documents if the chosen font includes different glyphs for certain kerned pairs ("ff" is common). It's also possible to completely remap a font, either intentionally to hinder copy-paste or simply as a programming expedient. In those cases, OCR will give a much better result than simple text extraction. It's further possible to restore accurate copy/paste ability to such a document by adding the embedded text layer, even though there's already a "text" layer used to render the page. |
Sorry for taking so long to respond.
I found your pdf samples very interesting. I've never before seen a pdf with both images and txt in the wild. Interestingly, my normal go to "pdfimages", didn't work on any of them. It was only when I extracted to xml using pdftohtml that I thought any of them had images at all.
Anyway, here's my point. If I have the images, why would I bother to OCR or covert them to text? I have the images. From what I understand, EPUB is just compressed HTML. Why couldn't I just strip the images and reference them in HTML and compress them?