weird text order about ocrmypdf

[OCRmyPDF-issuebot]

Comment by fritz-hh
Fri Jan 31 19:33:54 2014

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I could not reproduce the issue:

• neither with the PDF viewer embedded in firefox v26.0
• nor with Adobe Reader XI.

It is possible, that the issue only occurs with some PDF readers? With reader do you use?

[OCRmyPDF-issuebot]

Comment by femifrak
Fri Jan 31 21:05:11 2014

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I use the "Document Viewer 1.2.0" which can be launched with "atril".
When using Foxit Reader the text order is correct.
That is very good news. Thanks a lot for testing.

[OCRmyPDF-issuebot]

Comment by femifrak
Sat Feb 1 05:39:14 2014

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As the output format is pdf/a i am worried why some pdf readers cannot handle the text correctly. I see three possible reasons: 1) pdf/a is not well enough defined 2) The reader is really not accaptable 3) The output is not 100% pdf/a
As i want to use OCRmyPDF for archiving files, the text output could be unreadable in future.

[OCRmyPDF-issuebot]

Comment by fritz-hh
Tue Feb 4 21:23:01 2014

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1 and 3 are not the reason.
OCRmyPDF uses very mature tools (e.g. ghostscript) to generate the PDF/A file. Furthermore, OCRmyPDF validates the generated file against the PDF/A standard using jhove. Therefore the risk is very low that the file will won't be readable in the future. (Alltough I use OCRmyPDF for archiving files too, I cannot / won't provide any warranty...)
As discribed in #66, because the text layer is made of disconnected words and lines, basic PDF-reader can have difficulties to select the text accurately/reliably. Advanced PDF-readers should not have any problem. Seaching for words in the PDF should be possible even with basic PDF-readers.

If I have time, I will analyze how it is possible to improve selection accuracy on basic some PDF-readers. Therefore, I reopen the ticket.

[jbarlow83]

Tesseract's PDF renderer should do a better job of this in Tess 3.04.01