Python module for converting PDF to text [closed]

Answer 1

slate is a project that makes it very simple to use PDFMiner from a library:

>>> with open('example.pdf') as f:
...    doc = slate.PDF(f)
...
>>> doc
[..., ..., ...]
>>> doc[1]
'Text from page 2...'   

Answer 2

Repurposing the pdf2txt.py code that comes with pdfminer; you can make a function that will take a path to the pdf; optionally, an outtype (txt|html|xml|tag) and opts like the commandline pdf2txt {'-o': '/path/to/outfile.txt' ...}. By default, you can call:

convert_pdf(path)

A text file will be created, a sibling on the filesystem to the original pdf.

def convert_pdf(path, outtype='txt', opts={}):
    import sys
    from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter, process_pdf
    from pdfminer.converter import XMLConverter, HTMLConverter, TextConverter, TagExtractor
    from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
    from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFDocument, PDFParser
    from pdfminer.pdfdevice import PDFDevice
    from pdfminer.cmapdb import CMapDB

    outfile = path[:-3] + outtype
    outdir = '/'.join(path.split('/')[:-1])

    debug = 0
    # input option
    password = ''
    pagenos = set()
    maxpages = 0
    # output option
    codec = 'utf-8'
    pageno = 1
    scale = 1
    showpageno = True
    laparams = LAParams()
    for (k, v) in opts:
        if k == '-d': debug += 1
        elif k == '-p': pagenos.update( int(x)-1 for x in v.split(',') )
        elif k == '-m': maxpages = int(v)
        elif k == '-P': password = v
        elif k == '-o': outfile = v
        elif k == '-n': laparams = None
        elif k == '-A': laparams.all_texts = True
        elif k == '-D': laparams.writing_mode = v
        elif k == '-M': laparams.char_margin = float(v)
        elif k == '-L': laparams.line_margin = float(v)
        elif k == '-W': laparams.word_margin = float(v)
        elif k == '-O': outdir = v
        elif k == '-t': outtype = v
        elif k == '-c': codec = v
        elif k == '-s': scale = float(v)
    #
    CMapDB.debug = debug
    PDFResourceManager.debug = debug
    PDFDocument.debug = debug
    PDFParser.debug = debug
    PDFPageInterpreter.debug = debug
    PDFDevice.debug = debug
    #
    rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
    if not outtype:
        outtype = 'txt'
        if outfile:
            if outfile.endswith('.htm') or outfile.endswith('.html'):
                outtype = 'html'
            elif outfile.endswith('.xml'):
                outtype = 'xml'
            elif outfile.endswith('.tag'):
                outtype = 'tag'
    if outfile:
        outfp = file(outfile, 'w')
    else:
        outfp = sys.stdout
    if outtype == 'txt':
        device = TextConverter(rsrcmgr, outfp, codec=codec, laparams=laparams)
    elif outtype == 'xml':
        device = XMLConverter(rsrcmgr, outfp, codec=codec, laparams=laparams, outdir=outdir)
    elif outtype == 'html':
        device = HTMLConverter(rsrcmgr, outfp, codec=codec, scale=scale, laparams=laparams, outdir=outdir)
    elif outtype == 'tag':
        device = TagExtractor(rsrcmgr, outfp, codec=codec)
    else:
        return usage()

    fp = file(path, 'rb')
    process_pdf(rsrcmgr, device, fp, pagenos, maxpages=maxpages, password=password)
    fp.close()
    device.close()

    outfp.close()
    return

Answer 3

Try PDFMiner. It can extract text from PDF files as HTML, SGML or "Tagged PDF" format.

The Tagged PDF format seems to be the cleanest, and stripping out the XML tags leaves just the bare text.

A Python 3 version is available under:

• https://github.com/pdfminer/pdfminer.six

Answer 4

PDFminer gave me perhaps one line [page 1 of 7...] on every page of a pdf file I tried with it.

The best answer I have so far is pdftoipe, or the c++ code it's based on Xpdf.

see my question for what the output of pdftoipe looks like.

Answer 5

Found that solution today. Works great for me. Even rendering PDF pages to PNG images. http://www.swftools.org/gfx_tutorial.html

Answer 6

pyPDF works fine (assuming that you're working with well-formed PDFs). If all you want is the text (with spaces), you can just do:

import pyPdf
pdf = pyPdf.PdfFileReader(open(filename, "rb"))
for page in pdf.pages:
    print page.extractText()

You can also easily get access to the metadata, image data, and so forth.

A comment in the extractText code notes:

Locate all text drawing commands, in the order they are provided in the content stream, and extract the text. This works well for some PDF files, but poorly for others, depending on the generator used. This will be refined in the future. Do not rely on the order of text coming out of this function, as it will change if this function is made more sophisticated.

Whether or not this is a problem depends on what you're doing with the text (e.g. if the order doesn't matter, it's fine, or if the generator adds text to the stream in the order it will be displayed, it's fine). I have pyPdf extraction code in daily use, without any problems.