CAM::PDF is very naive (i.e. fitting great to tasks it was designed to solve at the time) about text extraction. Single-byte encoding only, not to mention just Latin1, and the "ToUnicode" tables ignored completely. Don't even try this or any other pure Perl modules for serious extraction. Last time I checked, the muPDF tool (and matching, but not always -- depending on version unfortunately -- Ghostscript's txtwrite device) produce nice xml output with correctly (if it's possible at all for this PDF) encoded characters, along with position, style attributes etc. Then these tools' output can be parsed using XML::Simple or similar, i.e. with Perl.

Edit. I have a patch for CAM::PDF, but maybe first you provide your typical PDF (or two, if from diverse sources) for tests. Text encoding was not a problem, but as I see there are also rather naive choices in regard to layout heuristics. May run into problems, then it's all not worth the effort and better to use dedicated tools.

In reply to Re: Converting PDF file to text by vr
in thread Converting PDF file to text by cerian

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