News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What's so hard about PDF text extraction? by aidos on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @03:46PM (#22478568)
That’s actually often just a consequence of the subsetting (I think). Believe it or not, you can often rebuild the cmaps using information in the pdf to fix the mapping and make the extraction work again.
Re:What's so hard about PDF text extraction? by kbenson on Tuesday March 03, 2020 @05:22PM (#22479291)
> That’s actually often just a consequence of the subsetting (I think).

I would believe that. It was a pretty poor obfuscation method as they go, if it was intended for that.

> Believe it or not, you can often rebuild the cmaps using information in the pdf to fix the mapping and make the extraction work again.

Oh, I did. That's the flip side of my second paragraph above. When there's a business need to work around complications or obfuscations, that will also happen. :)