PDF是一种普遍存在的文档格式，它非常适合在共享文档的同时保留字体、图像和跨平台的总体布局。但是，在从文档中复制和粘贴文本时，有没有一种简单的方法来保留这种格式？

今天的问答环节是由SuperUser提供的，SuperUser是Stack Exchange的一个分支，是一个由社区驱动的问答网站分组。

问题

超级用户阅读器Colen正在寻找一种从PDF中提取文本的方法，同时保留格式：

When I copy text out of a PDF file and into a text editor, it ends up mangled in a variety of ways. Formatting like bold and italics are lost; soft line breaks within a paragraph of text are converted to hard line breaks; dashes to break a word over two lines are preserved even when they shouldn’t be; and single and double quotes are replaced with ? signs.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to copy text from a PDF and have formatting converted to HTML codes, “**art quotes” converted to ” and ‘, and line breaks done properly. Is there any way to do this?

对于Colen（和我们其他人）来说，有没有一种既快速又简单的方法可以在不牺牲格式的情况下获取抓取文本？

答案

超级用户贡献者Frabjous提供了一个结合了大量谨慎的解决方案：

Firstly, you have to understand what a PDF is. PDFs are designed to mimic a printed page, and they are designed only as an output format, not an input format. a PDF is basically a map containing the exact location of characters (individual letters or punctuation, etc.) or images. In most cases, a PDF does not even store information about where one word ends and another begins, much less things like soft breaks vs. hard breaks for paragraph endings.

(A few recent PDFs do store some information about this stuff, but that’s a new technology, and you’d be lucky to find PDFs like that. Even if you did, your PDF viewer might not know about it.)

Anyway, it’s up to your software to implement some kind of “artificial intelligence” to extract merely from the locati*** of individual characters what is a word, what is a paragraph, and so on. Different software is going to do this better than others, and it’s also going to depend on how the PDF was made. In any case, you should never expect perfect results. Having the output PDF is not the same as having the source document. Far better to try to obtain that if you can.

The standard solution to your kind of problem is to use Adobe Acrobat Professional (the expensive one, not the free reader) to convert the PDF to HTML. Even that is not going to get perfect results.

There is free software that can be used to extract text from PDFs with some of formatting intact, but again, don’t expect perfect results. See, e.g., calibre (which can convert to RTF format), pdftohtml/pdfreflow, or the AbiWord word processor (with all import/export plugins enabled). There’s also a PDF import plugin for OpenOffice.

But please don’t expect perfection with any of these results. You’re going against the grain here. PDF just is not meant as an editable input format.

如果你很难决定从哪个工具开始，Calibre是一个名副其实的文件瑞士**。您还可以使用它来转换PDF文件，以便在电子书阅读器上使用，并组织电子书/文档库。

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