Annotations from zotfile have weird spacing (example)

Hi,

When I extract annotations (from zotfile), they have weird spacing between the words. Please help.

"On e influentia l perspectiv e o n autobiographica l memor y ha s bee n terme d th e social interaction model (Nelson , 1993a) . Ac - cordin g t o thi s view , persona l memorie s becom e encode d an d subsequentl y accessibl e fo r verba l recal l throug h a proces s o f " co-cons t r uct i on " betwee n th e developin g chil d an d significan t adults . Concomitan t wit h th e acquisitio n o f language , th e chil d learn s t o tal k abou t hi s experience s throug h participatin g i n discussion s o f pas t event s wit h adults . B y learnin g th e dominan t" (Han et al 1998:701)"
  • That looks like the recognized text in your PDF is just low quality. If you Copy-paste the text manually from the PDF, does it look the same?
  • In my experience the PDF reader you use can influence the quality of cut/paste. For example, (in my use on a Mac) cutting from Preview tends to do this sort of thing with poorly implemented rendering of kerning, glyphs, and ligatures. When I cut and paste from the same document when viewed with Acrobat Reader I have much better results. Although the poor rendering of text in your example doesn't seem to be related to kerning, glyphs, or ligatures; it may be that another PDF viewer may provide you with much better results.
  • Thank you all very much! I think it has to do with the formatting of the individual pdfs. I've primarily noticed this issue with older pdfs/
  • Yes, this looks like whatever OCR program the creator of the PDF used to recognize the text didn't do a very good job. It's often difficult to get good text recognition on older publications, particularly if the images of the pages are low quality or the printing is fuzzy or stylized.
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