PDF to Text, a challenging problem

I don't think so, pdf.js is able to render a pdf content.

Which is different from extracting "text". Text in PDF can be encoded in many ways, in an actual image, in shapes (think, segments, quadratic bezier curves...), or in an XML format (really easy to process).

PDF viewers are able to render text, like a printer would work, processing command to show pixels on the screen at the end.

But often, paragraph, text layout, columns, tables are lost in the process. Even though, you see them, so close yet so far. That is why AI is quite strong at this task.

Correct me if im wrong, but pdf.js actually has a lot of methods to manipulate PDFs, no?

You are wrong. Pdf.js can extract text and has all facilities required to render and extract formatting. The latest version can also edit PDF files. It’s basically the same engine as the Firefox PDF viewer. Which also has a document outline, search, linking, print preview, scaling, scripting sandbox… it does not simply „render” a file.

Regarding tables, this here https://www.npmjs.com/package/pdf-table-extractor does a very good job at table interpretation and works on top of pdf.js.

I also didn’t say what works better or worse, neither do I go into PDF being good or bad.

I simply said that a ton of problems have been covered by

Yes, pdf.js can do that: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/master/web/viewer.htm....

The purpose of my original comment was to simply say: there’s an existing implementation so if you’re building a pdf file viewer/editor, and you need inspiration, have a look. One of the reasons why mozilla is doing this is to be a reference implementation. I’m not sure why people are upset with this. Though, I could have explained it better.