Symbols special characters mapping

[KiraUnderwood]

Hi All!
I have a small issue with the library.
My PDF contains special characters, which in Word are identified as 'Symbols' Font. This font is also detected by pdfplumber for those characters.
Even though I see that Adobe provides spec of mapping this font to Unicode, pdfplumber still uses standard encoding and replaces 'more than or equal' and 'less than of equal' to pound and double dagger signs.
Can I as a user of this library do something to preserve my symbols?
I found only one library, tabula-py which preserves them, but it is Java originally and also it reads everything into tables which I may not need.
Thank you,
Kira

[jsvine]

Hi @KiraUnderwood, and thanks for your interest in this library. Are you able to share the PDF?

[KiraUnderwood]

Hi! Yes, sure.
I've created it myself via word and using Symbols .
The library read it as SymbolsMT though...
I dont know how to share the file here.
But you may just paste this to Word and save it as PDF:
10  x  20
20  y 40

[KiraUnderwood]

oops, it does not work on pasting too...

[KiraUnderwood]

I've uploaded it to one of my repos:
https://github.com/KiraUnderwood/web/blob/master/example_pdf.pdf

[jsvine]

Thanks for sharing that, @KiraUnderwood. That's helpful. I don't think you'll be able to get pdfplumber to render those characters in the way you expect them to in plain text. Generally speaking, the information available to pdfplumber is the unicode representation in the PDF, rather than their visual "glyph" representation. (I would assume this is the case for most other tools, and I'm surprised that it worked in Tabula.)

[KiraUnderwood]

@jsvine Thanks a lot for the reply! That's what I suspected actually, since I tried other python libs too...thank you for confirming.