Can I read PDF or Word Docs with Node.js?

Question

I can\'t find any packages to do this. I know PHP has a ton of libraries for PDFs (like http://www.fpdf.org/) but anything for Node?

Answer 1

I would suggest looking into unoconv for your initial conversion, this uses LibreOffice or OpenOffice for the actual conversion. Which adds some overhead.

I'd setup a few workers with all the necessities setup, and use a request/response queue for handling the conversion... (may want to look into kue or zmq)

In general this is a CPU bound and heavy task that should be offloaded... Pandoc and others specifically mention .docx, not .doc so they may or may not be options as well.

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Note: I know this question is old, just wanted to provide a current answer for others coming across this.