[jira] [Created] (PDFBOX-5529) Wrong Text Extraction - Unwanted Extra Spaces in the middle of words

["Carlos Alfonso Maya (Jira)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Carlos Alfonso Maya created PDFBOX-5529:
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             Summary: Wrong Text Extraction - Unwanted Extra Spaces in the middle of words
                 Key: PDFBOX-5529
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-5529
             Project: PDFBox
          Issue Type: Bug
          Components: Text extraction
    Affects Versions: 2.0.27, 2.0.26, 2.0.25, 2.0.24, 2.0.23, 2.0.22, 2.0.21, 2.0.20, 2.0.19, 2.0.18, 2.0.17, 2.0.16, 2.0.15, 2.0.14, 2.0.13, 2.0.12, 2.0.11, 2.0.10, 2.0.9, 2.0.8, 2.0.7, 2.0.6, 2.0.5, 2.0.4, 2.0.3, 2.0.2, 2.0.1, 2.0.0
            Reporter: Carlos Alfonso Maya
         Attachments: image-2022-10-18-15-53-06-512.png, image-2022-10-18-16-23-00-123.png, image-2022-10-18-16-26-15-001.png

*Overview:* 
We are using PDFBOX as a third party API to extract text from financial PDF documents.

We have been using PDFBox since a long time back, and we have detected a problem related to a bad text extraction on PDFs from a Customer. 

Since we worked with Customer Data we cannot shared the PDF besides that are signed and we cannot even edit them.

*Description of the problem:*

By opening the PDF in Adobe Reader we can see several cases like the following screenshot:
!image-2022-10-18-15-53-06-512.png|width=221,height=211!

Visually it appears to have spaces between words, but if we copy the text from Adobe Reader and paste it into a text editor there is no extra spaces. 

The following is the output that PDFBOX generates at the moment of doing text extraction:
{code:java}
Da te
In v oice number
Ou r r eference
You r reference
Con tact person{code}

(!) *Important note: this behavior is present in all the versions of PDFBox.*



*Analysis:*

By downloading the PDFBOX source code 2.0.27 (this was checked as well in 2.0.26, 2.0.25 and 2.0.24) and testing/debugging we detected that the method _*writePage()* inside *PDFTextStripper.java*_ declared a list of objects:
{code:java}
List<LineItem> line = new ArrayList<LineItem>();{code}
Which subsequently the code add elements into the list:
{code:java}
line.add(LineItem.getWordSeparator()); 
.
.
.
line.add(new LineItem(position));{code}
 

And at some point it passes the list as a parameter into the following statement:
{code:java}
writeLine(normalize(line));{code}

(!) *The important about this list called "line" is that somehow the "LineItem" objects are having NULL values inserted into it, and this values are at some point interpreted as "blank spaces" causing the behavior described above.*


Here is an screenshot of how it is showed in the debugger:

!image-2022-10-18-16-23-00-123.png|width=621,height=195!

!image-2022-10-18-16-26-15-001.png|width=620,height=431!

 

We tried to look for a method that manipulates this list and that we can override, but all of these methods that modified or access the list are protected.

 



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