translation-files/skills/translation/references/proofread-pdf-workflow.md

PDF-vs-DOCX Proofread Workflow

Compare typeset PDF against the authoritative DOCX manuscript. Catch discrepancies introduced during typesetting: dropped words, terminology drift, repositioned phrases, extra content.

Pattern

The existing scripts/proofread-pdf.py is article-specific (hardcoded to 佛教徒的人生态度). For each new article, create a similarly-shaped script:

translate-files/<article>/<name>-<hash>.py

Hash = md5('translate-files/<article>')[:6]

Script Structure

1. Convert DOCX to plain text: pandoc docx -f docx -t plain --wrap=none
2. Convert PDF to plain text: pdftotext -layout pdf
3. Extract body from DOCX — find body start marker (first sentence of body)
4. Extract body from PDF — find same marker, filter out:
   • Page slugs: 文章名.*indd \d+
   • Headers: The Mindful Peace Academy Collection, article title
   • Page numbers: ^\d{1,3}$
   • Section numerals: ^(I|II|III|IV)$
   • Section name lines: ^(Three Basic Elements|...|Conclusion)$
5. Join hyphenated line breaks (word- at end + lowercase continuation)
6. Fix PDF artifacts: L iving → Living, T\s+he → The
7. Normalize both (collapse whitespace, unify quotes/dashes)
8. Compare with difflib.SequenceMatcher or sentence-level substring search

Pitfalls

• PDF hyphen joining drops the hyphen: self-knowing → selfknowing. This causes cascading word-level diff failures. Use sentence-level or chunk-based matching instead of word-by-word comparison.
• Section headers (I, II, III) may be present in DOCX body but filtered from PDF — not real discrepancies.
• The existing scripts/proofread-pdf.py is hardcoded for 佛教徒的人生态度. Do NOT reuse it for other articles without rewriting the body-start markers and filter patterns. Create article-specific scripts instead.
• git diff --word-diff fails when one file is multi-line and the other is single-line. Normalize both to single-line first.

Example

translate-files/正念禅修十要素/ten-elements-c7fcd9.py — extracts cleaned body from both sources, outputs to /tmp/ for side-by-side diffing.