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quanteda / readtext

an R package for reading text files
https://readtext.quanteda.io
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Two columns read as one line when reading PDF #174

Closed aourednik closed 1 year ago

aourednik commented 1 year ago

In a PDF with 2 column layout, readtext puts text from left and right column on same line instead of taking into account the text flow (even if this flow is correctly stored in the PDF file). Probably a problem with the underlying pdftools library. Cf. https://github.com/ropensci/pdftools/issues/95#issuecomment-1618764242

kbenoit commented 1 year ago

Yes, the pdftools does not handle two columns very well (or at all).

But pdftotext (command line utility) does, if you want to batch process them for more manual conversion into .txt.

(base) kbenoit@Kens-Mac-mini ~ % pdftotext -h
pdftotext version 23.01.0
Copyright 2005-2023 The Poppler Developers - http://poppler.freedesktop.org
Copyright 1996-2011, 2022 Glyph & Cog, LLC
Usage: pdftotext [options] <PDF-file> [<text-file>]
  -f <int>             : first page to convert
  -l <int>             : last page to convert
  -r <fp>              : resolution, in DPI (default is 72)
  -x <int>             : x-coordinate of the crop area top left corner
  -y <int>             : y-coordinate of the crop area top left corner
  -W <int>             : width of crop area in pixels (default is 0)
  -H <int>             : height of crop area in pixels (default is 0)
  -layout              : maintain original physical layout
  -fixed <fp>          : assume fixed-pitch (or tabular) text
  -raw                 : keep strings in content stream order
  -nodiag              : discard diagonal text
  -htmlmeta            : generate a simple HTML file, including the meta information
  -tsv                 : generate a simple TSV file, including the meta information for bounding boxes
  -enc <string>        : output text encoding name
  -listenc             : list available encodings
  -eol <string>        : output end-of-line convention (unix, dos, or mac)
  -nopgbrk             : don't insert page breaks between pages
  -bbox                : output bounding box for each word and page size to html. Sets -htmlmeta
  -bbox-layout         : like -bbox but with extra layout bounding box data.  Sets -htmlmeta
  -cropbox             : use the crop box rather than media box
  -colspacing <fp>     : how much spacing we allow after a word before considering adjacent text to be a new column, as a fraction of the font size (default is 0.7, old releases had a 0.3 default)
  -opw <string>        : owner password (for encrypted files)
  -upw <string>        : user password (for encrypted files)
  -q                   : don't print any messages or errors
  -v                   : print copyright and version info
  -h                   : print usage information
  -help                : print usage information
  --help               : print usage information
  -?                   : print usage information