Often just a gap on a page in a PDF file
I was sent an interesting PDF file to investigate this week. The issue was that spaces were appearing in the text when translated into HTML5. Intrigued, I dived in to see what was going on… The PDF file was created using Corel’s PDF Engine. This often has its own unique way of doing things (to…
Space: The final frontier These are the challenges of the IDRSolutions team Its 12 year mission To explore strange specification interpretations To seek out new interpretations To boldly go where no PDF has gone before… Before we continue I should apologise now for the Star Trek references, I was incredibly tempted and thought, Why not!…
The PDF text stream contains the instructions to draw the actual contents of the PDF. One of these instructions is the Tj command, which takes a text string. So (Hello)Tj will write the word Hello onto the PDF page at the current co-ordinate location. Things get more interesting if you were to use (Hello World)Tj…
Many PDF files do not actually contain any text spaces. They contain gaps between letters and the software has to guess if there is a space in the text. Sometimes there may be spaces but this is more often what you might see in the PDF text. We have 1 genuine space but lots of…
