That's exactly right; PDF describes how to position elements on the page, but it doesn't have any built-in concept of a 'table'. As a result, any PDF writer is free to do anything from create its own table command to individually positioning each character in the table in any order, with arbitrary commands in between each table entry.

The formatting commands above actually mimic the most common PDF code fairly well.

In reply to Re^3: Extracting tables from PDF by Dervish
in thread Extracting tables from PDF by dsheroh

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