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Comment by jbarrow

Editing text in PDFs is _really_ hard compared to other document formats because most PDFs don't really encode the "physics" of the document. I.e. there isn't a notion of a "text block with word wrapping," it's more "glyphs inserted at location X with font Y."

If the PDF hasn't been made accessible, you have to do a lot of inferencing based on the layout about how things are grouped and how they should flow if you want to be able to make meaningful edits. Not impossible (Acrobat does it), but very challenging.

It's part of the legacy of PDF as a format for presentation and print jobs, rather than typesetting.

parent jbarrow 1 year ago

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