# French PDF to EPUB: guillemets and apostrophes

Source: https://epubcc.com/cases/french-pdf/ (updated 2026-11-04)

French punctuation survives conversion when the PDF stores real text: « » guillemets keep their inner spaces, apostrophes and accented capitals come through, and the EPUB is tagged as French. On this 22-page Wikipedia article other engines recover more continuous text than ours.

Problem: Guillemets with spaces inside (« … »), a space before ; and :, typographic and straight apostrophes, accented capitals (É) and the œ ligature.

- Limitation: pdf_oxide extract_text (0.903), OpenDataLoader (0.891) and PDFium (0.884) have a clearly higher 8-gram recall than our engine (0.819) on this document. Most of the gap is in pages with floating images and the reference list.
- Limitation: Typographic (’) and straight (') apostrophes are kept as the PDF has them; the engine does not unify them.
- Limitation: Wikipedia references leave out tables and infoboxes, so precision is low for every engine.