Thanks for the suggestions tmaly.
As I mentioned in the OP, I did look at CAM::PDF. The module you mentioned is kinda useful for rough output. However it doesn't handle layout at all (it is almost useless for my tabular data) and it can't handle the text encoding that I mentioned in my reply to desemondo. If I used it I'd still have to work at the stream level, but since it doesn't have any support for fonts I thought that PDF::API2 (which appears to support fonts) might be better. In other words, I was hoping I could avoid traversing the root dictionary (which if done properly would be a potentially huge job - to many object references!) by using PDF::API2.

Just to clarify: the original documents for these PDFs are most likely to be Excel spreadsheets. They don't contain embedded HTML. "<\d+>" is just the way character \d+ (in the example, from font "F13") is encoded.

In reply to Re^4: Extracting text from a PDF (using PDF::API2) by music_man1352000
in thread Extracting text from a PDF (using PDF::API2) by music_man1352000

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.