feat: Add smart whitespace stripping for CJK text #801
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Summary
This PR adds an intelligent whitespace stripping feature specifically designed for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) text, which often contains unwanted spaces and line breaks when extracted from PDFs and scanned documents.
Problem Statement
When performing OCR on CJK documents (especially PDFs), users often encounter:
Solution
This PR implements a smart whitespace stripping algorithm that:
✅ Removes spaces between CJK characters only (preserves English word spacing)
✅ Removes soft line breaks (after non-punctuation characters)
✅ Preserves hard line breaks (after sentence-ending punctuation: 。!?;:)
✅ Handles paragraph breaks (double newlines → single newline)
✅ Works seamlessly with mixed CJK-Latin text
Implementation Details
User Interface
strip-whitespacesto user preferencesTechnical Changes
Algorithm
The algorithm uses Unicode ranges to detect CJK characters and applies different rules:
Test Coverage
Added comprehensive unit tests in
test_transformer.py:All tests pass ✅
Example Usage
Before (OCR output with artifacts):
After (with smart stripping enabled):
Benefits
Compatibility
Related Issues
This addresses common complaints about CJK OCR quality and unwanted whitespace in extracted text.
Testing: Tested on Ubuntu 24.04 with Python 3.10, Tesseract 5.3.4, and various Chinese documents.