PDFBOX, Reading a pdf line by line and extracting text properties

Question

I am using pdfbox to extract text from pdf files. I read the pdf document as follows

    PDFParser parser = null;
    String text = \"\";
    PDFTextStripper         


        

Answer 1

extract the text properties such as bold,italic, from each line. How can I achieve this with pdfbox library

Properties such as bold and italic are not first-class properties in a PDF.

Bold or italic writing in PDFs is achieved either using

• different fonts (which is the better way); in this case one can try to determine whether or not the fonts are bold or italic by

  • looking at the font name: it may contain a substring "bold", "italic", "oblique"...

  • looking at some optional properties of the font, e.g. font weight...

  • inspecting embedded font file.

  Neither of these methods is fool-proof; or

• using the same font as for non-bold, non-italic text but using special techniques to make them appear bold or italic (aka poor man's bold), e.g.

  • not only filling the glyph contours but also drawing a thicker line along it for a bold impression,

  • drawing the glyph twice, the second time slightly displaced, also for a bold impression,

  • using a text or transformation matrix to slant the letters for an italic impression.

By overriding the PDFTextStripper methods with such tests accordingly, you may achieve a fairly good guess rate for styles during PDF text extraction.