Oh man, don't get me started! I wrote some PDF processing software last year -- it was supposed to extract pinout diagrams from integrated circuit datasheets --

Oh man, don't get me started! I wrote some PDF processing software last year -- it was supposed to extract pinout diagrams from integrated circuit datasheets -- and to extract the text was a ridiculous task. Since characters can be specified in any order, what I had to do was look at their positions on the rendered page and then clump those into words with some overly complicated graph algorithms. Working with PDF should not be this hard. If I were making a PDF successor, this would be one of the top problems to fix. At least make text selection work properly! And simplify the format a little, would you please? To get any sort of compatibility with my PDF processing program I had to write it as a custom rendering backend for the Poppler PDF engine. It should not be this hard.