EpubCCLine-numbered PDFs (bills, pleadings): not handled yet
Updated:
Line numbers in the margin are not handled yet: on a 50-page U.S. Senate bill the EpubCC engine writes the numbers 1 to 24 as a stack of short paragraphs before each page's text and splits about 24 words per 1,000. Other engines do worse on continuity (8-gram recall 0.09 to 0.51 against our 0.559), but none gives a clean result.
Original and result
Every line numbered 1 to 24 in the left margin, a page number at the top, hyphenated words at the end of short lines, and deep indentation for each level of the bill.
Download source PDF Download the sample EPUB
Why we publish a case that fails
Bills, court pleadings and transcripts often number every line. A converter that silently keeps those numbers produces an EPUB that is hard to read, and you should know that before uploading a 500-page filing. Removing margin line numbers is on the list of engine fixes; this page will be regenerated when it works.
Source and licence
- Document
- S. 1409, Kids Online Safety Act, introduced in the Senate (GPO)
- Licence
- Public domain (work of the U.S. Government)
- Pages
- 50
- Traits
- text PDF, one column, line numbers, legal text
S. 1409 (118th Congress), Kids Online Safety Act, as introduced in the Senate on 2 May 2023, U.S. Government Publishing Office (govinfo.gov). A work of the U.S. Government, in the public domain.
Settings used
- Engine: EpubCC engine at commit 3b74b26, the binary that generated the images and the sample (2026-11-04).
- Pages: the whole document for the figures; pages 3–4 for the images and the sample EPUB.
- Benchmark figures: a run of 2026-11-04 with the same binary, every engine on the whole document; this document is not yet part of the published benchmark.
- Options: none. The engine has no per-document settings yet; the same defaults apply to every file.
Validation and results
EPUBCheck EPUBCheck on our EPUB: 0 errors, 0 warnings.
EPUBCheck 5.4.0 on the downloadable sample: 0 errors, 0 warnings (checked 2026-11-04).
- Pages
- 50
- Time
- 0.05 s
- Peak memory
- 20 MB
- Chapters
- none detected
- Split words / 1,000
- 23.6
- Quality warnings
- 1
Quality warnings the engine showed:
- No chapters were detected: the book stays in a single section.
Benchmark run of 2026-11-04, not yet part of the published benchmark.
| Engine | 8-gram recall |
|---|---|
| EpubCC engine (EPUB output) | 0.559 |
| EpubCC engine (plain text) | 0.558 |
| pdf_oxide · extract_text | 0.184 |
| pdf_oxide · to_plain_text (XY-cut) | 0.089 |
| pdf_oxide · Markdown | 0.511 |
| PDFium · text().all() | 0.088 |
| OpenDataLoader PDF (local mode) | 0.088 |
| pdftotext (Poppler) | 0.101 |
Limitations we observed
- The line numbers are kept as a run of one-number paragraphs at the start of each page instead of being removed.
- Words hyphenated at a line end are sometimes split with a space instead of joined («serv ice», «sub ject»): 23.6 split words per 1,000 in our EPUB.
- Indentation levels ((A), (i), (I)) are flattened; the outline of the bill is not rebuilt.
- No chapters are detected, and the engine warns about it.
- Our 8-gram recall (0.559) is the highest of the engines measured, which says more about how hard this layout is than about the quality of our result.