Missing whitespaces between words

[lwollenbergfuzzy]

While reading a PDF, we encountered a problem where white spaces between words were missing.

The enviorment is the following:
pypdf==5.7.0,
crypt_provider=('cryptography', '45.0.4'),
PIL=11.2.1

To reproduce the problem use the following code:

import pypdf
from pathlib import Path

pdf_path = Path("PSIqualicision_A2_v1.7.1_202502131610_p13.pdf")
with pdf_path.open("rb") as pdf_file:
    pypdf_reader = pypdf.PdfReader(pdf_file)
    page = pypdf_reader.get_page(0)
    print(page.extract_text())

which results in the following output:

CHAPTER
THREE
GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE ELEMENTS
ThischapterdealswiththegraphicaluserinterfaceofPSIqualicisionA2anddescribesthegeneralelementsandfunc-
tions of the application.
3.1 The main window
The following image shows the main window of PSIqualicision A2.
9

The line in question looks like this in the PDF:

The PDF is here

[stefan6419846]

Did you try to set space_width to another value or tried the layout mode?

Nevertheless, text extraction is an evergreen, as documented as well: https://pypdf.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user/extract-text.html#whitespaces

[nylocx]

We tried both without success. Maybe we have to somehow write a detection for such cases and fall back to an OCR extraction step. If anything changes in pyPDF regarding this please let us know.

[stefan6419846]

If there are changes like this, we usually have a corresponding entry in our changelog. Thus I recommend you to just watch it (as you should do anyway for other relevant changes). (It is unlikely that I am able to keep track of all related issues/discussions to announce such changes there.)

[nylocx]

Ok, we do that anyway. Thanks for your time, I was hoping the file could be added to some kind of automated (regression)testing.

[stefan6419846]

You are of course invited to provide a corresponding PR, although given the current situation, I have some doubts that this will get fixed in a timely manner unless you are looking into providing a solution in pypdf yourself.