How to extract text from a PDF? [closed]

Answer 1

One of the comments here used gs on Windows. I had some success with that on Linux/OSX too, with the following syntax:

gs \
 -q \
 -dNODISPLAY \
 -dSAFER \
 -dDELAYBIND \
 -dWRITESYSTEMDICT \
 -dSIMPLE \
 -f ps2ascii.ps \
 "${input}" \
 -dQUIET \
 -c quit

I used dSIMPLE instead of dCOMPLEX because the latter outputs 1 character per line.

Answer 2

An efficient command line tool, open source, free of any fee, available on both linux & windows : simply named pdftotext. This tool is a part of the xpdf library.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdftotext

Answer 3

For image extraction, pdfimages is a free command line tool for Linux or Windows (win32):

pdfimages: Extract and Save Images From A Portable Document Format ( PDF ) File

Answer 4

On my Macintosh systems, I find that "Adobe Reader" does a reasonably good job. I created an alias on my Desktop that points to the "Adobe Reader.app", and all I do is drop a pdf-file on the alias, which makes it the active document in Adobe Reader, and then from the File-menu, I choose "Save as Text...", give it a name and where to save it, click "Save", and I'm done.

Answer 5

Here is my suggestion. If you want to extract text from PDF, you could import the pdf file into Google Docs, then export it to a more friendly format such as .html, .odf, .rtf, .txt, etc. All of this using the Drive API. It is free* and robust. Take a look at:

https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/files/insert https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/files/get

Because it is a rest API, it is compatible with ALL programing languages. The links I posted aboove have working examples for many languages including: Java, .NET, Python, PHP, Ruby, and others.

I hope it helps.

Answer 6

As the question is specifically about alternative tools to get data from PDF as XML so you may be interested to take a look at the commercial tool "ByteScout PDF Extractor SDK" that is capable of doing exactly this: extract text from PDF as XML along with the positioning data (x,y) and font information:

Text in the source PDF:

Products | Units | Price 

Output XML:

 <row>
 <column>
  <text fontName="Arial" fontSize="11.0" fontStyle="Bold" x="212" y="126" width="47" height="11">Products</text> 
  </column>
 <column>
  <text fontName="Arial" fontSize="11.0" fontStyle="Bold" x="428" y="126" width="27" height="11">Units</text> 
  </column>
 <column>
  <text fontName="Arial" fontSize="11.0" fontStyle="Bold" x="503" y="126" width="26" height="11">Price</text> 
  </column>
</row>

P.S.: additionally it also breaks the text into a table based structure.

Disclosure: I work for ByteScout