Oh, this is fun, the gift that keeps on giving, like my book clubs, where the worst books generate the most vigorous conversations.
We’re all having fun, right?
__________
Alternatives:
No, I do not offer alternatives as if I have compared them to the current offering, but only to suggest alternatives for us to explore – great that others feel engaged enough to do a one-for-one comparison, more, please … and thanks.
__________
PDF to text and Unicode versus tabs / whitespace tab equivalents:
… depends not only on the source PDF, but on the presence or lack of sophisticated intelligence of the programmers.
Scrutinizing source PDFs ignores the programmer’s ability or inability to interpret the presentation of PDF content as a human interprets the presentation.
That is, I do not care if there are invisible non-printing codes between letters or words or page elements, or if letter are stores in any particular font or unicode or multicode or bols markers for each letter versus one bald marker for an entire word or headline of multiple words.
If Soft-Xpansion programmers care, and try to make it my business, then that says possibly a variety of things, including they are selling to PDF publishing houses who are the source of their own PDFs, not end users who are dealing with PDFs from any source.
Line breaks mid sentence, and page numbers mid sentence, are only one part of the PDF-to-text presentation I shared, the most critical challenge to understand was the tab-delimiting between words.
Whether “tab” is a character or is a presentation effect accomplished by any other means does not concern me.
No, the characters were not separated as if 2 bytes instead of one, the words were separated as if laid out in spreadsheet column.
Note, I shared text output for all to inspect – look at it, it’s just cut-and-paste – and I cited the source, so go ahead and dive in, anyone who wants to explore.
I note that tab-equivalent-delimited results are unrelated to Unicode, that is, the spaces between words are variable, but exactly what is needed to align the next word with the previous row of word’s alignment, that is, a column, a spreadsheet, tab-delimited, by spaces or tabs or whatever it takes to line up the best word regardless of the length of the current word, but hey …
__________
Free resources, because, hey this is an SOS freebie thread.
I shared a source that was free to me, and not available in other formats.
“The Boy Electrician” book by Alfred Powell Morganis is freely available side by side with other freely available file formats.
The “The Boy Electrician” PDF is not original from the publisher, but was generated, the PDF is not a product of original publisher, and there is no need to export text from it.
As mentioned, an original publisher probably can purposefully insert non-printable codes that sully the PDF’s auto-conversion to text, I do not know, nor do I care.
I get free ebooks from the library, at least, some are in PDF format only, plus there are a gazillion resources out there, and the internal format is dependent on variables we cannot know, considering the various re-editing and re-formatting and “cleaning up” done between any original sources versus the copy we can get our hands on – again, I do not know, nor do I care.
My point, and I do have one, is that Soft-Xpansion Perfect PDF 9 Editor seems to scrutinize the internal coding structures, and miss the human-interpretable presentation.
Who knows, maybe the PDF I started with has a code between words, and Soft-Xpansion honored that … it does not matter, really.
__________
Soft-Xpansion never replying to email request ( yet ):
Yes, Soft-Xpansion might have interpreted some email requests as non-legitimate, and then decided to not reply … who knows, maybe someone tripped over a power cord at their workspace and they lost some emails in process.
In the cases I experienced, they would be wrong to not respond and empower folks to try out their old software in order to get familiar with the terrific customer service capabilities of their software and of their support, and they have missed opportunities to present their software to SOS participants regardless of their reasons for not responding ( yet ).
__________
These are just tools, and if they work for anyone anytime for any purpose, great.
That is, if we can actually install them and get them working on screen.
__________
We’re having gun, right?
.