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When I search for a word in a PDF file using mupdf. It, only, finds the whole word. For example, searching for the word “meaningless” will find the whole word:

This is a short, staggeringly meaningless sentence.

There is no way I can know in advance whether a word is broken over two lines – and therefore: hyphenated – or not. Searching for hyphenation explicitly would also be too cumbersome. However, when a word is wrapped at the end of a line , it will not be found. Searching for “meaningless” won’t find the word in this example:

This is a short, staggeringly meaning-
less sentence.

The PDF viewer "Evince" behaves in the same way. Is there a (simple) way to make "Mupdf" find hyphenated terms?

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4 Answers 4

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Note that the PDF doesn't contain the original text, but a description which glyphs to put where. Searching text in a PDF depends on (1) the PDF having table(s) which describe which glyphs correspond to which unicode chars (2) a way to reassemble those translated chars into words (3) assumptions about how the generating application worked, e.g. put down glyphs in text order (which e.g. will horrendously fail when two-column text is rendered in both columns simultanously).

To take into account hyphenation, you'd have to implement an algorithm that detects dashes at the end of a line (different glyphs could be used for that), and then merges the word (and takes special rules about hypenation into account, e.g. for German ck).

So yes, it can be done, but not easily, and then it would work only for some languages/scripts anyway.

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Searching for word in a PDF is really a function of the viewer. As such, each viewer takes a different approach to what it will work with. In practice, I found Okular was the best choice between all the PDF viewers that I had tested. To the best of my knowledge Mupdf can't handle hyphenated words.

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I don’t know how to do it inside MuPDF, but one way of getting those lines / matches is to filter it with pdftotext

 pdftotext file.pdf - | grep 'meaningless'

By default, pdftotext unhyphenates the lines.

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Evince starting in version 43, supports this feature (finding words which are splitted at end of a line, whether hyphenated or not).

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