PDFBox adding white spaces within words

Question

When I try to extract text from my PDF files, it seems to insert white spaces between severl words randomly.

I am using pdfbox-app-1.6.0.jar (latest version) on fol

Answer 1

The class org.apache.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper (pdfbox-1.7.1) allows to modify the propensity to decide if two strings are part of the same word or not.

Increasing spacingTolerance will reduce the number of inserted spaces.

/**
 * Set the space width-based tolerance value that is used
 * to estimate where spaces in text should be added.  Note that the
 * default value for this has been determined from trial and error.
 * Setting this value larger will reduce the number of spaces added. 
 * 
 * @param spacingToleranceValue tolerance / scaling factor to use
 */
public void setSpacingTolerance(float spacingToleranceValue) {
    this.spacingTolerance = spacingToleranceValue;
}