# German PDF to EPUB: umlauts, ß and „quotes“

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

German text converts cleanly when the PDF stores real Unicode text: ä, ö, ü, ß and the low-high „…“ quotes come through unchanged and the EPUB is tagged as German. On an 86-page Wikipedia article our 8-gram recall is 0.845, below pdf_oxide's 0.877.

Problem: Umlauts and ß, „…“ quotation marks, long compound words and hyphenated pairs such as «Freiheits- und Brüderlichkeitsideale».

- Limitation: pdf_oxide extract_text (0.877) and OpenDataLoader (0.862) have a higher 8-gram recall than our engine (0.845) on this document.
- Limitation: A real hyphen at the end of a line followed by a capital letter can be lost: in an EU regulation we converted, «Online-» + «Desinformation» became «OnlineDesinformation». The pages shown here have no such break.
- Limitation: Wikipedia references leave out tables and infoboxes, so precision is low for every engine.