cleaning up pdftotext font issues

Posted by mankoff on Super User See other posts from Super User or by mankoff
Published on 2010-12-09T23:06:55Z Indexed on 2011/01/11 4:56 UTC
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pdf

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convert

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ascii

I'm using pdftotext to make an ASCII version of a PDF document (made with LaTeX), because collaborators prefer a simple document in MS word.

The plain text version I see looks good, but upon closer inspection the f character seems to be frequently mis-converted depending on what characters follow. For example, fi and fl often seem to become one special character, which I will try to paste here: ? and ?.

What is the best way to clean up the output of pdftotext? I am thinking sed might be the right tool, but am not sure how to detect these special characters.

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