I went down a rabbit hole while making a canvas based UI library from scratch.. and started reading about the history of NeWS, display postscript, and postscrip

I went down a rabbit hole while making a canvas based UI library from scratch.. and started reading about the history of NeWS, display postscript, and postscript in general. I started reading the ISO spec for postscript used in modern PDFs. You can read it yourself here: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PD... What actually needs to be done to extract text correctly is to be able to parse the postscript, have a way of figuring out how the raw text.. or the curves that draw the text.. are displayed (whether they are or not and in relation to each other) using information that the postscript gives you. Edit: More than anything I think understanding deeply the class of PDFs you want to extract data from is the most important part. Trying to generalize it is where the real difficulty comes from.. as in most things.