title: Preserve "long" spaces in PDFBox text extraction
body: <p>I am using PDFBox to extract text from PDF. 
  The PDF has a tabular structure, which is quite simple and columns are also very widely spaced from each-other</p>
  
  <p>This works really well, except that all kinds of horizontal space gets converted into a single space character, so that I cannot tell columns apart anymore (space within words in a column looks just like space between columns).</p>
  
  <p>I appreciate that a general solution is very hard, but in this case the columns are really far apart so that having a simple differentiation between "long spaces" and "space between words" would be enough.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to tell PDFBox to turn horizontal whitespace of more then x inches into something other than a single space? A proportional approach (x inch become y spaces) would also work.</p>
  
  <p>The <a href="http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html" rel="nofollow">pdftotext C library/tool</a> has a '-layout' switch that tries to preserve the layout. Basically, if I can emulate that with PDFBox, that would be perfect.</p>