Why not skipping all the minus signs unless they do not immediately precede a number. I see all the minus signs are after the number, not before, so just skip if they are not before. Preferably in the same BT/ET block as the number.
It's the ground truth, and it's not like it's more complex than parsing a pdf, at this point, the technology for OCR might even be better than PDF parsing, which is full of accidental instead of natural complexity.
This is a great example of why a PDF’s text layer is not necessarily the same as its visible content.
I’d be cautious about making “non-black means invisible” the general rule. A possible middle ground between raw text extraction and full OCR would be to render the page, map each extracted glyph’s bounding box back to the rendered pixels, and discard glyphs that have almost no contrast with their local background.
That would preserve the exact embedded text for visible characters while using rasterization only to determine visibility.
Why not skipping all the minus signs unless they do not immediately precede a number. I see all the minus signs are after the number, not before, so just skip if they are not before. Preferably in the same BT/ET block as the number.
Does this end on a cliffhanger?
Did they try one method, and what was the feedback?
I did try method number two, and it worked. I should update this post.
OCR the PDF.
It's the ground truth, and it's not like it's more complex than parsing a pdf, at this point, the technology for OCR might even be better than PDF parsing, which is full of accidental instead of natural complexity.
This is a great example of why a PDF’s text layer is not necessarily the same as its visible content.
I’d be cautious about making “non-black means invisible” the general rule. A possible middle ground between raw text extraction and full OCR would be to render the page, map each extracted glyph’s bounding box back to the rendered pixels, and discard glyphs that have almost no contrast with their local background.
That would preserve the exact embedded text for visible characters while using rasterization only to determine visibility.
Has anyone tried this kind of hybrid approach?