Unexpected new line in the parsed text since v1.24.0 about pymupdf

[JorjMcKie]

The PDF text is written in Helvetica Base-14 font with an array of explicitly given character widths, where the width of the space character is not given ... and therefore 0!
So arguably, neither of the versions 'Hello World\n', nor 'Hello \nWorld\n' is correct. The formally correct output might be "HelloWorld" which is the way how the PDF viewers display it.
If extracting by words page.get_text("words") we get

In [8]: page.get_text("words")
Out[8]:
[(100.0,
  270.20001220703125,
  154.6719970703125,  # x1 of "Hello"
  303.1759948730469,
  'Hello',
  0,
  0,
  0),
 (154.6719970703125,  # x0 of "World"
  270.20001220703125,
  217.33599853515625,
  303.1759948730469,
  'World',
  0,
  1,
  0)]

... we see that the end coordinate of "Hello" equals the start coordinate of "World" - which is correct.
Extracting with option "dict", the versions 1.23 and 1.24 indeed behave differently. Based on blocks=page.get_text("dict")["blocks"], version 1.23 gives us one span:

In [4]: blocks=page.get_text("dict")["blocks"]
In [5]: [s for b in blocks for l in b["lines"] for s in l["spans"]]
Out[5]:
[{'size': 24.0,
  'flags': 0,
  'font': 'Helvetica',
  'color': 0,
  'ascender': 1.0750000476837158,
  'descender': -0.29899999499320984,
  'text': 'Hello World',
  'origin': (100.0, 296.0),
  'bbox': (100.0, 270.20001220703125, 217.33599853515625, 303.1759948730469)}]

Whereas version 1.24 gives us 2 spans:

In [9]: blocks=page.get_text("dict")["blocks"]
In [10]: [s for b in blocks for l in b["lines"] for s in l["spans"]]
Out[10]:
[{'size': 24.0,
  'flags': 0,
  'font': 'Helvetica',
  'color': 0,
  'ascender': 1.0750000476837158,
  'descender': -0.29899999499320984,
  'text': 'Hello ',
  'origin': (100.0, 296.0),
  'bbox': (100.0, 270.20001220703125, 161.343994140625, 303.1759948730469)},
 {'size': 24.0,
  'flags': 0,
  'font': 'Helvetica',
  'color': 0,
  'ascender': 1.0750000476837158,
  'descender': -0.29899999499320984,
  'text': 'World',
  'origin': (154.6719970703125, 296.0),
  'bbox': (154.6719970703125,
   270.20001220703125,
   217.33599853515625,
   303.1759948730469)}]

But however you view it, it is based on a design decision taken in MuPDF not in PyMuPDF. MuPDF's CLI tool also produces the following when executing mutool draw -o test.txt "Simple PDF 2.0 file.pdf":

I suggest you join the MuPDF channel on Discord to discuss this with the team there.
In the meantime, I am taking the liberty to convert this post to a Discussions item.