`getRawTextContent` does not returns words' pieces in proper coordinate order

[gkostov]

Hey,

getRawTextContent seems to assume that word pieces in the bidiTexts array appear in ascending order of their y coordinate but they probably do appear as they are being added by the PDF rendering software. I have a file where a line of text looking on screen like

Some label 12.3 4455

appears in that array as

Some label | 3 | . | 2 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4

that is, the character groups are properly following one after the other but the order of individual characters within the groups is reversed. And getRawTextContent() naively returns

Some label 3.21 5544

The y number of each item correctly shows the correct position but the code is not considering that (it only checks the absolute y difference).

So I wonder if this has a known solution before I go and change the code myself?

Cheers for the nice work.

[modesty]

can you upload the PDF?

[gkostov]

There is personal identification information in there so can't upload here. May I send it to your email (that's on your Github account)? Thanks for your help!

[gkostov]

Hm, just checked again and it seems the problem is not in getRawTextContent directly because the bidiTexts already has those characters concatenated. I saw the raw character elements appearing in pdfData.Pages[0].Texts. And even if I've not yet seen that array to be processed somewhere the y values in there indicate the correct ordering of the characters. I need to trace the code more to see where exactly the concatenation goes wrong.

---

It seems

pdf2json/base/core/evaluator.js

Line 808 in 48b50bf

getTextContent: function PartialEvaluator_getTextContent(

is what builds the bidiTexts array and it added characters in order of appearance from the parser of the binary stream.

[modesty]

you can email me or create new PDF, either way works.