Kindle clippings from pdfs have no whitespace

bmf · 08-31-2011, 05:44 PM

Hi

I often read pdfs on my kindle and make notes and highlights. I then parse the clippings file and associate notes with highlights so I can save time on capturing the knowledge. Some pdfs save highlights without any whitespace, eg

Quote:

becauseitmeansonly

Any ideas for avoiding this? I can work around it by manually inserting spaces but would rather not.

EbokJunkie · 08-31-2011, 08:52 PM

I have seen this happen. This means that text layer doesn't have spaces between words. Built-in dictionary also doesn't recognize words. If you can find Sony reader try to load the book to it and see how attempt to highlight the word highlights whole line instead.
Same happens if text layer is missing and pdf has only images of pages.

bmf · 09-01-2011, 05:37 PM

Hi - this pdf certainly has genuine text as opposed to scanned pages. I can use pdftohtml and see the text in the resulting html file with whitespace.

Dumping just the offending line from the clippings file to another file and then running chardet against it just outputs the encoding type ascii. I have a bad feeling my kindle is somehow misinterpreting the pdf and I'm loosing the data at the time the highlight is written to clippings.txt and therefore I'm stuffed!

EbokJunkie · 09-02-2011, 12:27 AM

That's interesting. However, I'm still sure that white spaces are missing from original pdf. Instead, characters are just drawn at prescribed positions within the line space. Just recently we found the same issue with pdfs created by Prince XML software if (and only if) pdf generated from xml file is fully justified: Adobe Reader Mobile used by Amazon and Sony cannot distinguish words for highlighting.
Could you make a sample of problem file available for download?

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08-31-2011, 08:52 PM	#2
EbokJunkie Addict Posts: 229 Karma: 13495 Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: SoCal Device: Kindle 3, Kindle PW, Pocketbook 301+, Pocketbook Touch, Sony 950, 350	I have seen this happen. This means that text layer doesn't have spaces between words. Built-in dictionary also doesn't recognize words. If you can find Sony reader try to load the book to it and see how attempt to highlight the word highlights whole line instead. Same happens if text layer is missing and pdf has only images of pages.

09-01-2011, 05:37 PM	#3
bmf Member Posts: 13 Karma: 10 Join Date: Oct 2010 Device: Kindle 3	Hi - this pdf certainly has genuine text as opposed to scanned pages. I can use pdftohtml and see the text in the resulting html file with whitespace. Dumping just the offending line from the clippings file to another file and then running chardet against it just outputs the encoding type ascii. I have a bad feeling my kindle is somehow misinterpreting the pdf and I'm loosing the data at the time the highlight is written to clippings.txt and therefore I'm stuffed!

09-02-2011, 12:27 AM	#4
EbokJunkie Addict Posts: 229 Karma: 13495 Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: SoCal Device: Kindle 3, Kindle PW, Pocketbook 301+, Pocketbook Touch, Sony 950, 350	That's interesting. However, I'm still sure that white spaces are missing from original pdf. Instead, characters are just drawn at prescribed positions within the line space. Just recently we found the same issue with pdfs created by Prince XML software if (and only if) pdf generated from xml file is fully justified: Adobe Reader Mobile used by Amazon and Sony cannot distinguish words for highlighting. Could you make a sample of problem file available for download?

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