searching for matching words in pdf using page.searc_for

Question

I have a list of words which I am searching in a pdf document using fitz in python The code generally works for most of the words except for a few like "efficiency"

My code is given below :

        if (len(re.findall(f'\\b{phrase.casefold()}s?\\b', mpage.casefold(), flags=0))>0) :
        
             text_instances = page.search_for(phrase, quads=True)

This code works for mostly all words except for some words e.g. efficiency For the word "efficiency", the if statement successfully matches but the page.search_for statement does not match The word efficiency given in the image below has different fonts for first and second f Is it because of this that the word is not matched?

The reason is that certain character combinations are not stored as separate characters, but as one - so-called "ligatures". The most frequent ones and their hex codes are ∗ "ff" -> 0xFB00, ∗ "fi" -> 0xFB01,∗ "fl" -> 0xFB02, ∗ "ffi" -> 0xFB03, ∗ "ffl" -> 0xFB04, ∗ "ft" -> 0xFB05, ∗ "st" -> 0xFB06. You should use a text extraction package that is capable of disassembling those characters codes, like PyMuPDF. — Jorj McKie
– Jorj McKie, Commented Dec 18, 2023 at 10:58
Text extraction is successful, but i need to also highlight the text in the pdf, hence using page.search_for with quads = True — vani
– vani, Commented Dec 18, 2023 at 11:18
Thanks . Your solution here github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF/issues/1503. helped me get the answer — vani
– vani, Commented Dec 18, 2023 at 11:32

vani · Accepted Answer · 2023-12-18 11:42:43Z

0

I got the solution. In order to disregard ligatures, we should set flags = 0 as

text_instances = page.search_for(phrase,flags = 0, quads=True)

This link helped me finding the solution https://github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF/issues/1503

Thanks to @jorj-mickie https://stackoverflow.com/users/4474869/jorj-mckie

edited Dec 18, 2023 at 11:42

answered Dec 18, 2023 at 11:30

vani

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