Timeline for Which software converts academic publications from PDF to Word without mangling complex formatting?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
4 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 11, 2021 at 18:54 | comment | added | Jeff | @PhilvanKleur I'm not totally up-to-date on the PDF specification, but it's my understanding that it defines the position of each piece of text using x-y coordinates that represent its distance from the upper-left hand corner. So there ARE no actual space characters; they're just white space left over in between the other pieces. There's unfortunately no perfect solution to get around this, other than finding sources that aren't in PDF formats. | |
| Jan 11, 2021 at 18:12 | comment | added | Phil van Kleur | I didn't know that .docx files were zip files! But thanks for the explanation. I have often noticed that spacing gets messed up when I copy-paste from PDFs. That is very annoying, and affects me as well as the student, just because sometimes I need to quote from a paper and only have it as a PDF. How do you get around that? And, out of curiosity, how is the PDF representing the text and the spaces in it? | |
| Jan 11, 2021 at 18:11 | vote | accept | Phil van Kleur | ||
| Jan 11, 2021 at 18:11 | |||||
| Jan 8, 2021 at 14:20 | history | answered | Jeff | CC BY-SA 4.0 |