How PDF Text Extraction Tool Distinguishes Real Line Breaks from Soft Wraps

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A Windows application called PDF Privacy Checker uses character coordinate data to determine which line breaks in extracted PDF text are genuine paragraph boundaries versus soft-wrapped lines. The challenge arises because pdfium, the PDF rendering engine used by Chrome, inserts a line break after every visual line, fragmenting sentences mid-paragraph. Simply removing all breaks causes lists, tables, and structured content to collapse into unreadable strings. The tool rebuilds visual lines from character bounding boxes and applies eight conditions to each pair of neighbouring lines, joining them only when all conditions are met. Tested on 3,751 labelled breaks across 10 articles and 29 business PDFs, the method correctly restored 89.8% of soft wraps with 95.2% join accuracy.

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