title: Absolute positions in PDFBox
body: <p>I'm writing a program that converts <code>TeX</code>-generated PDFs back to a <code>TeX</code>-like string of text. In order to achieve that I use <code>Apache PDFBox</code>.</p>
  
  <p>I would like to be able to detect subscripts, superscripts and then use a <code>TeX</code>-like method to denote them. I have read this question: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27700500/superscript-and-subscript-differentiation-using-pdf-box">Superscript and subscript differentiation using pdf box</a> which isn't really helpful because it is impossible to detect subscripts and superscripts using <code>Y</code> and <code>EndY</code> probably because they are relative. Is there any way to detect the absolute position of text? The height of a glyph is actually easy to obtain as long as people use old TeX fonts though so I can easily detect font size change.</p>