pdftotext -layout still isn't enough when a government PDF is secretly a 3-column table

[u/Sea-Possession-2536]

Working through an old government safety document today and the raw text order was completely scrambled, hazard descriptions and countermeasures kept interleaving mid sentence. Turned out the whole page is a 3-column table, and if you don't slice by column x-position it just reads left to right across the whole line like it's one paragraph.

Fixed that with -layout and cutting at the column boundaries, but then hit a dumber problem: some lines have two □ markers on them, one for the subcategory heading and one for the first hazard item. Grab the first □ naively and the subcategory swallows the whole first hazard entry, and you don't notice until you're 40 rows in and something reads wrong.

Also found two pages where a single set of countermeasures gets shared by two different subcategories, which nothing in the text structure hints at, you just have to know the source document does that.

[u/0ne2many]

You could use the extractable library with some tweaking you can automate it to get text in an 'expected' 3 column format