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Pdftotext of xpdf is working fine for normal embedded fonts file , but fails where embedded subsets fonts are there . Is there any workaround for this issue ?

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The issue is probably that the characters which are rendered using the subset font have a custom encoding - the numeric representation of the characters does not correspond to ASCII, Latin-1 or any other common encoding.

See

This means there isn't an easy workaround.

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In this situation, I have printed the PDFs using the Adobe PDF printer via a high resolution (1200 dpi+), high quality image(up any settings you can). Then, I OCR the image PDF leaving me with a searchable and workable PDF.

When I have many PDFs to do over thousands of pages, I have opened multiple PDF windows at once to do this simultaneously using multiple cores for multiple PDFs. It is a PITA, but it works.

Hopefully your files are small! I've done this to upwards of 10,000 pages once (building code books). Not fun.

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  • Thanks for the answer . But how come the pdf viewer is able to correctly interpret it ? Oct 8, 2013 at 12:52
  • Probably because the encoding is embedded in the PDF, not the program.
    – Damon
    Oct 8, 2013 at 16:53

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