+1

I've used the profiler to find out which lines take most time to execute. It is this '.find()' method in the inline 'isany()' method, in the 'group_textboxes()' method of 'LTLayoutContainer' that takes 65% of the time!

This method takes so long because theboxes input is a long list. And this is directly caused by group_objects() not grouping vertical aligned objects by default. This can be enabled by setting LAParams.detect_vertical to True.

So you can fix your problem by using laparams = LAParams(detect_vertical=True).

If @thf24 or @SVasilev agree, this issue can be closed.

ok thanks, I just ran some unit tests on normal (non-rotated) pages with the detect_vertical=True and didn't seem to get much of a performance loss, so I wonder why this is not enabled by default? Can be closed though.

I'm not sure either why False is the default. Maybe it deterroriates the quality of the output?

Hey there guys. Thanks for spending time on that issue. For some of my PDFs I do see slight improvement if I use detect_vertical=True.
But for some of the PDFs it does not look like it helps. Here is an example:
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/93/e9/69/f780b3b43c6635/EP1338665A1.pdf

For this document for example page 17 takes 6.6 seconds and page 18 takes 5.71 seconds with and without the flag. Any further suggestions? Maybe I can play with other LAParams properties?

Can be closed though.

I don't understand why is this issue closed. There is currently no solution to the problem.
Or you keep your bugs in separate issue tracker?

Hello, any other solutions ?

@SVasilev @migliorati the issue described by @thf24 is fixed by enabling detection of vertical text boxes. I consider this issue closed because this specific question is answered.

I get that this solution does not work for all PDF's and for all code. If you have performance issues with specific PDF's or if you think pdfminer.six is slow in general for some subset of all PDF's, feel free to open a new issue.