Re:IDPF, EPUB Standardizing Body, Has Combined with W3C
by gsnedders on Monday February 06, 2017 @09:45AM
(#13579829)
> When you look inside a PDF, it is formatted as "put characters ABC at page location X,Y", you then have to try to extract the text from that by manually tracing the flow / columns / etc.
And as you want to do more and more complex things with letter spacing you end up with ever shorter flows of characters; there are certainly some tools that end up creating every character individually so even extracting a single word in Latin script is hard.
ePub is one of the best formats for blind people, they can read all contents of most books very easily. You can (like HTML) basically just dump out plain text by ignoring all the tags.
PDFs are the worst format that is commonly available, it isn't much better than a jpg of text. There are many programs that try to convert PDFs back into plain text, they all get confused by sufficiently complex PDFs. When you look inside a PDF, it is formatted as "put characters ABC at page location X,Y", you then have to try to extract the text from that by manually tracing the flow / columns / etc.