chengchang
Joined 9 years ago
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Jan 4
Joined 9 years ago
So I wrote PDFlower to reflow PDF papers for small-screen reading.
Compared with plain-text extraction based tools, PDFlower reconstructs the object level - columns, formulas, tables and figures - layout using some smart heuristics, and then renders them for new page size.
The PDF format will ignore some structures of paper and `draw` contents on a fixed-layout flat document. For a char, e-readers cannot know it belongs a paragraph, a figure caption or a formula. Plus, publishers render original paper with the specific style. It is a problem. Some research concentrate to improve PDF format, extract infos for scholarly papers, like articles on DocEng - a compute science conference: http://dl.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE135. Then I read the spec of PDF format...
Anyway, that's hurt.