Extracting text from a PDF file

Question

Hi, I need to extract the text from a PDF file. This text will likely be in a table format, and it is going to be used for automatic transfer of data between an external party and our systems.

Can anyone suggest a command line tool (eg pdf to txt) or a library that would be good for this?

Language options:

• C# (preferred)
• Java (if I must)

I found some ideas here, but i think the guy was talking more about a one-off situation, i'm talking more like a daily import:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/488089/extracting-tables-from-pdf-files

Answer 1

try this

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/PDFToText.aspx

Bye

Answer 2

pdftotext seems to do the trick quite nicely.

pdftotext file.pdf [textfile.txt]

Edit: I'm not sure how you would like to retain information about the tables. The best looking output (to my human eye, at least) is produced by

pdftotext -layout file.pdf [textfile.txt]

This maintains the original layout of the document as best as possible. In particular, the tables still look pretty good in the text output. The default is to interpret the columns of the table as columns of text (terrible). Another option that doesn't look as good to me, but might still be useful, is the -raw option.

Answer 3

try the opensource java pdf library

http://www.lowagie.com/iText/docs.html

Answer 4

Hi there,

I can't provide a solution but only offer general advice. My advice to you is to open a PDF document in Notepad or another Plain Text editor and study the formatting codes. They're very easy to understand. For example, //par is a Paragraph and //tab is a Tab. Once you know the formatting codes for table layouts, it'll be very easy for you to come up with your own solution to extract anything from a PDF document.

Answer 5

There is also PdfBox and JPedal on Java. Tables do not exist in the PDF file format so any software will be 'guessing' them.

Answer 6

Apache Tika is open-source Java toolkit that specializes in what you are looking for: extracting structured context from various documents including pdf.

It does use PDFBox for pdf file format but provides level of abstraction that is ideal for extracting structured context.

It contains command line utility - see here.