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A comment on Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014).

Re:Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014) by mytddu on Sunday August 14, 2016 @04:50AM (#12284851)
My gripe with PDF is that it's the standard format for academic publishing, rendering a whole mass of scientific knowledge largely inaccessible for text processing purposes. I've wanted to analyze the Libgen archive of journal articles for a long time but have never found an adequate solution for extracting text from PDFs. Any suggestions on this?
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Re:Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014) by IngoBlechschmid on Sunday August 14, 2016 @05:02AM (#12284891)
Sure, the Linux tool "pdftotext" works just fine for this. Two small caveats: ligatures get converted to proper Unicode ligatures and not their ASCII fallback (as one might want or expect) and of course complex mathematical formulas are rendered badly.
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Re:Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014) by mytddu on Sunday August 14, 2016 @05:55AM (#12285027)
I've tried both pdftotext and pdf2txt and I remember not being satisfied with either. Neither seem to handle non-ASCII characters very well, but I'll take another look soon though.
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Re:Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014) by nitrogen on Sunday August 14, 2016 @04:56AM (#12284866)
Pdf2txt wasn't helpful?

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/pdf2txt.1.h...

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Re:Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014) by based2 on Sunday August 14, 2016 @08:06AM (#12285282)
https://pdfbox.apache.org/
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