How to extract text from a PDF? [closed]

Answer 1

The best thing I can currently think of (within the list of "simple" tools) is Ghostscript (current version is v.8.71) and the PostScript utility program ps2ascii.ps. Ghostscript ships it in its lib subdirectory. Try this (on Windows):

gswin32c.exe ^
   -q ^
   -sFONTPATH=c:/windows/fonts ^
   -dNODISPLAY ^
   -dSAFER ^
   -dDELAYBIND ^
   -dWRITESYSTEMDICT ^
   -dCOMPLEX ^
   -f ps2ascii.ps ^
   -dFirstPage=3 ^
   -dLastPage=7 ^
   input.pdf ^
   -dQUIET ^
   -c quit

This command processes pages 3-7 of input.pdf. Read the comments in the ps2ascii.ps file itself to see what the "weird" numbers and additional infos mean (they indicate strings, positions, widths, colors, pictures, rectangles, fonts and page breaks...). To get a "simple" text output, replace the -dCOMPLEX part by -dSIMPLE.

Answer 2

PdfTextStream (which you said you have been looking at) is now free for single threaded applications. In my opinion its quality is much better than other libraries (esp. for things like funky embedded fonts, etc).

Alternatively, you should have a look at Apache PDFBox, open source.

Answer 3

Apache pdfbox has this feature - the text part is described in:

http://pdfbox.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/pdfbox/util/PDFTextStripper.html

for an example implementation see https://github.com/WolfgangFahl/pdfindexer

the testcase TestPdfIndexer.testExtracting shows how it works

Answer 4

QuickPDF seems to be a reasonable library that should do what you want for a reasonable price.

http://www.quickpdflibrary.com/ - They have a 30 day trial.

Answer 5

Since today I know it: the best thing for text extraction from PDFs is TET, the text extraction toolkit. TET is part of the PDFlib.com family of products.

PDFlib.com is Thomas Merz's company. In case you don't recognize his name: Thomas Merz is the author of the "PostScript and PDF Bible".

TET's first incarnation is a library. That one can probably do everything Budda006 wanted, including positional information about every element on the page. Oh, and it can also extract images. It recombines images which are fragmented into pieces.

pdflib.com also offers another incarnation of this technology, the TET plugin for Acrobat. And the third incarnation is the PDFlib TET iFilter. This is a standalone tool for user desktops. Both these are free (as in beer) to use for private, non-commercial purposes.

And it's really powerful. Way better than Adobe's own text extraction. It extracted text for me where other tools (including Adobe's) do spit out garbage only.

I just tested the desktop standalone tool, and what they say on their webpage is true. It has a very good commandline. Some of my "problematic" PDF test files the tool handled to my full satisfaction.

This thing will from now on be my recommendation for every sophisticated and challenging PDF text extraction requirements.

TET is simply awesome. It detects tables. Inside tables, it identifies cells spanning multiple columns. It identifies table rows and contents of each table cell separately. It deals very well with hyphenations: it removes hyphens and restores complete words. It supports non-ASCII languages (including CJK, Arabic and Hebrew). When encountering ligatures, it restores the original characters...

Give it a try.

Answer 6

I was given a 400 page pdf file with a table of data that I had to import - luckily no images. Ghostscript worked for me:

gswin64c -sDEVICE=txtwrite -o output.txt input.pdf

The output file was split into pages with headers, etc., but it was then easy to write an app to strip out blank lines, etc, and suck in all 30,000 records. -dSIMPLE and -dCOMPLEX made no difference in this case.