Script to extract text from PDF files

[Dan Strohl]

Its possible (likely) that I came into this in the middle, so sorry if this was already thrown out... but have you looked at any of the following suggestions?

https://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=pdf+convert&submit=search
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6413441/python-pdf-library
https://www.binpress.com/tutorial/manipulating-pdfs-with-python/167



-----Original Message-----
From: Python-list [mailto:python-list-bounces+d.strohl=f5.com at python.org] On Behalf Of Scott Werner
Sent: Friday, November 06, 2015 2:30 PM
To: python-list at python.org
Subject: Re: Script to extract text from PDF files

On Tuesday, September 25, 2007 at 1:41:56 PM UTC-4, brad wrote:
> I have a very crude Python script that extracts text from some (and I 
> emphasize some) PDF documents. On many PDF docs, I cannot extract 
> text, but this is because I'm doing something wrong. The PDF spec is 
> large and complex and there are various ways in which to store and 
> encode text. I wanted to post here and ask if anyone is interested in 
> helping make the script better which means it should accurately 
> extract text from most any pdf file... not just some.
> 
> I know the topic of reading/extracting the text from a PDF document 
> natively in Python comes up every now and then on comp.lang.python...
> I've posted about it in the past myself. After searching for other 
> solutions, I've resorted to attempting this on my own in my spare time.
> Using apps external to Python (pdftotext, etc.) is not really an 
> option for me. If someone knows of a free native Python app that does 
> this now, let me know and I'll use that instead!
> 
> So, if other more experienced programmer are interested in helping 
> make the script better, please let me know. I can host a website and 
> the latest revision and do all of the grunt work.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Brad

As mentioned before, extracting plain text from a PDF document can be hit or miss. I have tried all the following applications (free/open source) on Arch Linux. Note, I would execute the commands with subprocess and capture stdout or read plain text file created by the application.

* textract (uses pdftotext)
- https://github.com/deanmalmgren/textract

* pdftotext
- http://poppler.freedesktop.org/
- cmd: pdftotext -layout "/path/to/document.pdf" -
- cmd: pdftotext "/path/to/document.pdf" -

* Calibre
- http://calibre-ebook.com/
- cmd: ebook-convert "/path/to/document.pdf" "/path/to/plain.txt" --no-chapters-in-toc

* AbiWord
- http://www.abiword.org/
- cmd: abiword --to-name=fd://1 --to-TXT "/path/to/document.pdf"

* Apache Tika
- https://tika.apache.org/
- cmd: "/usr/bin/java" -jar "/path/to/standalone/tika-app-1.10.jar" --text-main "/path/to/document.pdf"

For my application, I saw the best results using Apache Tika. However, I do still encounter strange encoding or extraction issues, e.g. S P A C E D  O U T  H E A D E R S" and "\nBroken \nHeader\n". I ended up writing a lot of repairing/cleaning methods.

I welcome an improved solution that has some intelligence like comparing the extract plain text order to a snapshot of the pdf page using OCR.
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