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Sure all formats require some parsing to get to the content. However Tex, HTML, Word, Excel and languages like that were designed to allow people to format text
by contravariant 10y ago
Sure all formats require some parsing to get to the content. However Tex, HTML, Word, Excel and languages like that were designed to allow people to format text and other data into a document. Therefore they generally make text and other information appear sequentially, and separate display logic from content.
PostScript and PDF have no such separation, the are the display logic. They are fully fledged programs that list the position, size, font, colour, of every symbol on every page, if you're lucky in a vaguely logical order, but there's no reason it should be. If the files were written by a human you may have some hope of extracting some of the content, but almost nobody writes PDF or PostScript by hand any-more.