Random space added inside words

[miro-igov]

I am extracting text from PDF file with pypdf and it seems buggy. The extracted text contains word with spaces that do not exist in source pdf.
Example:
PDF contains phrase - Postchirurgie (strabisme, ptérygion)
Extracted text contains - P ostchirurgie (strabism e ,ptérygion)

Why are these extra spaces inside the words?

Environment

Which environment were you using when you encountered the problem?

$ python -m platform
Linux-6.12.25-0-virt-x86_64-with

$ python -c "import pypdf;print(pypdf._debug_versions)"
pypdf==5.7.0, crypt_provider=('cryptography', '44.0.2'), PIL=11.1.0

Code + PDF

This is a minimal, complete example that shows the issue:

from pypdf import PdfReader


filepath = '/tmp/test.pdf'
pdfObj = open(filepath, 'rb')
reader = PdfReader(pdfObj)
out_txt = ''
for p in reader.pages:
    out_txt += p.extract_text()
pdfObj.close()

print(out_txt)

Share here the PDF file(s) that cause the issue. The smaller they are, the
better. Let us know if we may add them to our tests!

test.pdf

[stefan6419846]

Thanks for your report. As mentioned in our docs, text extraction is hard. You might want to have a look at the different parameters and try different variants there.

If you want to further analyze this, feel free to do so. We appreciate PRs which improve the general accuracy of the extraction if there is actual room for improvement.