Interesting. Two engineers at Apple worked on something similar that would slurp character bounding boxes from a PDF page and reconstruct paragraphs, columns, tables, etc.
It was surfaced in iOS a decade ago as "tap to zoom" feature for PDFs. It's funny — as with a lot of things there was a lot of sophisticated engineering under the hood and then marketing simply wants it to detect a tap in a paragraph and zoom to its bounds.
I can't think of the last time I read a PDF on my phone or I would test it to see if it still works as I remember.
el_benhameen•8m ago
Wow, I had no idea. That’s pretty cool. I don’t read a ton of pdfs on my phone, but I always find it super frustrating when that functionality is missing somewhere else.
JKCalhoun•1h ago
It was surfaced in iOS a decade ago as "tap to zoom" feature for PDFs. It's funny — as with a lot of things there was a lot of sophisticated engineering under the hood and then marketing simply wants it to detect a tap in a paragraph and zoom to its bounds.
I can't think of the last time I read a PDF on my phone or I would test it to see if it still works as I remember.
el_benhameen•8m ago