Python module for converting PDF to text [closed]

Question

Is there any python module to convert PDF files into text? I tried one piece of code found in Activestate which uses pypdf but the text generated had no space between and was of no use.

Brotherson

I was looking for similar solution. I just need to read the text from the pdf file. I don't need the images. pdfminer is a good choice but I didn't find a simple example on how to extract the text. Finally I got this SO answer (#5725778) and now using it. – Demob

Since the question got closed I reposted it on the Stack Exchange dedicated to software recommendations in case someone wants to write a new answer: Python module for converting PDF to text – Atoll

The only solution that worked for me for UTF-8 content: Apache Tika – Katelyn

I would like to update the available options list for PDF to Text conversion in Python, GroupDocs.Conversion Cloud SDK for Python converts PDF to text accurately. – Teage

Try using PDFminer.six, see this answer for examples: https://mcmap.net/q/87295/-extracting-text-from-a-pdf-file-using-pdfminer-in-python – Colleague

PyPDF2 improved its text extraction a lot! Give it another shot :-) – Reservoir

Can we mark this as a duplicate of How to extract text from a PDF file? – Reservoir

Answer 1

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

Underwear

I just added an answer descibing how to use pdfminer as a library. – Trusty

The answer I provided in this thread might be useful for people looking at this answer and wondering how to use the library. I give an example on how to use the PDFMiner library to extract text from the PDF. Since the documentation is a bit sparse, I figured it might help a few folks. – Harrietteharrigan

Can you please help me figure out how to convert pdf to tagged pdf format? – Land

sample code at https://mcmap.net/q/87295/-extracting-text-from-a-pdf-file-using-pdfminer-in-python – Dowager

pdfminder comes with a command line utility that is pretty usable with PDFs that are actual text: unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/index.html#pdf2txt. – Plague

Unfortunately pdfminer is not really fast, especially when you are going to use it for long pdf documents with more than 100 pages. – Sg

Try PDFminer.six, for examples, see this Stackoverflow answer: https://mcmap.net/q/87295/-extracting-text-from-a-pdf-file-using-pdfminer-in-python – Colleague

Answer 2

The PDFMiner package has changed since codeape posted.

EDIT (again):

PDFMiner has been updated again in version 20100213

You can check the version you have installed with the following:

>>> import pdfminer
>>> pdfminer.__version__
'20100213'

Here's the updated version (with comments on what I changed/added):

def pdf_to_csv(filename):
    from cStringIO import StringIO  #<-- added so you can copy/paste this to try it
    from pdfminer.converter import LTTextItem, TextConverter
    from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFDocument, PDFParser
    from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter

    class CsvConverter(TextConverter):
        def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
            TextConverter.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)

        def end_page(self, i):
            from collections import defaultdict
            lines = defaultdict(lambda : {})
            for child in self.cur_item.objs:
                if isinstance(child, LTTextItem):
                    (_,_,x,y) = child.bbox                   #<-- changed
                    line = lines[int(-y)]
                    line[x] = child.text.encode(self.codec)  #<-- changed

            for y in sorted(lines.keys()):
                line = lines[y]
                self.outfp.write(";".join(line[x] for x in sorted(line.keys())))
                self.outfp.write("\n")

    # ... the following part of the code is a remix of the 
    # convert() function in the pdfminer/tools/pdf2text module
    rsrc = PDFResourceManager()
    outfp = StringIO()
    device = CsvConverter(rsrc, outfp, codec="utf-8")  #<-- changed 
        # becuase my test documents are utf-8 (note: utf-8 is the default codec)

    doc = PDFDocument()
    fp = open(filename, 'rb')
    parser = PDFParser(fp)       #<-- changed
    parser.set_document(doc)     #<-- added
    doc.set_parser(parser)       #<-- added
    doc.initialize('')

    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrc, device)

    for i, page in enumerate(doc.get_pages()):
        outfp.write("START PAGE %d\n" % i)
        interpreter.process_page(page)
        outfp.write("END PAGE %d\n" % i)

    device.close()
    fp.close()

    return outfp.getvalue()

Edit (yet again):

Here is an update for the latest version in pypi, 20100619p1. In short I replaced LTTextItem with LTChar and passed an instance of LAParams to the CsvConverter constructor.

def pdf_to_csv(filename):
    from cStringIO import StringIO  
    from pdfminer.converter import LTChar, TextConverter    #<-- changed
    from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
    from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFDocument, PDFParser
    from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter

    class CsvConverter(TextConverter):
        def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
            TextConverter.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)

        def end_page(self, i):
            from collections import defaultdict
            lines = defaultdict(lambda : {})
            for child in self.cur_item.objs:
                if isinstance(child, LTChar):               #<-- changed
                    (_,_,x,y) = child.bbox                   
                    line = lines[int(-y)]
                    line[x] = child.text.encode(self.codec)

            for y in sorted(lines.keys()):
                line = lines[y]
                self.outfp.write(";".join(line[x] for x in sorted(line.keys())))
                self.outfp.write("\n")

    # ... the following part of the code is a remix of the 
    # convert() function in the pdfminer/tools/pdf2text module
    rsrc = PDFResourceManager()
    outfp = StringIO()
    device = CsvConverter(rsrc, outfp, codec="utf-8", laparams=LAParams())  #<-- changed
        # becuase my test documents are utf-8 (note: utf-8 is the default codec)

    doc = PDFDocument()
    fp = open(filename, 'rb')
    parser = PDFParser(fp)       
    parser.set_document(doc)     
    doc.set_parser(parser)       
    doc.initialize('')

    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrc, device)

    for i, page in enumerate(doc.get_pages()):
        outfp.write("START PAGE %d\n" % i)
        if page is not None:
            interpreter.process_page(page)
        outfp.write("END PAGE %d\n" % i)

    device.close()
    fp.close()

    return outfp.getvalue()

EDIT (one more time):

Updated for version 20110515 (thanks to Oeufcoque Penteano!):

def pdf_to_csv(filename):
    from cStringIO import StringIO  
    from pdfminer.converter import LTChar, TextConverter
    from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
    from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFDocument, PDFParser
    from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter

    class CsvConverter(TextConverter):
        def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
            TextConverter.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)

        def end_page(self, i):
            from collections import defaultdict
            lines = defaultdict(lambda : {})
            for child in self.cur_item._objs:                #<-- changed
                if isinstance(child, LTChar):
                    (_,_,x,y) = child.bbox                   
                    line = lines[int(-y)]
                    line[x] = child._text.encode(self.codec) #<-- changed

            for y in sorted(lines.keys()):
                line = lines[y]
                self.outfp.write(";".join(line[x] for x in sorted(line.keys())))
                self.outfp.write("\n")

    # ... the following part of the code is a remix of the 
    # convert() function in the pdfminer/tools/pdf2text module
    rsrc = PDFResourceManager()
    outfp = StringIO()
    device = CsvConverter(rsrc, outfp, codec="utf-8", laparams=LAParams())
        # becuase my test documents are utf-8 (note: utf-8 is the default codec)

    doc = PDFDocument()
    fp = open(filename, 'rb')
    parser = PDFParser(fp)       
    parser.set_document(doc)     
    doc.set_parser(parser)       
    doc.initialize('')

    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrc, device)

    for i, page in enumerate(doc.get_pages()):
        outfp.write("START PAGE %d\n" % i)
        if page is not None:
            interpreter.process_page(page)
        outfp.write("END PAGE %d\n" % i)

    device.close()
    fp.close()

    return outfp.getvalue()

Keystroke

In [6]: import pdfminer In [7]: pdfminer.__version__ Out[7]: '20100424' In [8]: from pdfminer.converter import LTTextItem ImportError: cannot import name LTTextItem .... LITERALS_DCT_DECODE LTChar LTImage LTPolygon LTTextBox LITERAL_DEVICE_GRAY LTContainer LTLine LTRect LTTextGroup LITERAL_DEVICE_RGB LTFigure LTPage LTText LTTextLine – Roentgenoscope

@skyl, the code above is for the previous version '20100213'. From the list of changes on their website, it looks like they changed LTTextItem to LTChar. unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/index.html#changes – Keystroke

If anyone come across this post in need for a decent way to read line by line the pdfs like I wanted to and couldn't manage to on the most recent version, very minor adjustements in this code will make it functional in 20110515: Adding a dir line to see what was going on did all the trick. On line 19, change for child in self.cur_item.objs: to for child in self.cur_item._objs: (just add an underline to objs) ; and on line 23 do the same for text, that is: line[x] = child.text.encode(self.codec) should change to line[x] = child._text.encode(self.codec) – Tradesman

See also unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/programming.html – Tradesman

@Oeufcoque Penteano, thanks! I've added another section to the answer for version 20110515 per your comment. – Keystroke

It is too bad that I ended up having to use another tool for this that is not open source (although free) to pre process the pdf part. Do you know if it is possible to recover the white spaces using pdfminer? I am getting all characters separated by ';' from this code version, but the whitespaces don't come along. I would really love if I could switch to a open source version :) – Tradesman

the latest version works but there is an semicolon after every character, i tried lots of things but wasn't able to fix it. any idea how to avoid it? – Fionafionna

It seems to me, that pdfminer is no solution, since it breaks the code on every change! There is also a lack of good documentation, while the download link on the "official" page only links back to its own! – Dobsonfly

The answer given by @user3272884 works as of 5-1-2014 – Wristband

I had to solve this same problem today, modified tgray's code a bit to extract information about whitespace, posted it here – Drees

Why not just post this on Github? – Decoteau

The API of PDFminer has changed once again. There's now a fork to pdfminer.six Here is a working example from May 2020. from pdfminer.high_level import extract_text then text = extract_text('report.pdf') https://mcmap.net/q/87295/-extracting-text-from-a-pdf-file-using-pdfminer-in-python – Colleague

Answer 3

Since none for these solutions support the latest version of PDFMiner I wrote a simple solution that will return text of a pdf using PDFMiner. This will work for those who are getting import errors with process_pdf

import sys
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from pdfminer.converter import XMLConverter, HTMLConverter, TextConverter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from cStringIO import StringIO

def pdfparser(data):

    fp = file(data, 'rb')
    rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
    retstr = StringIO()
    codec = 'utf-8'
    laparams = LAParams()
    device = TextConverter(rsrcmgr, retstr, codec=codec, laparams=laparams)
    # Create a PDF interpreter object.
    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
    # Process each page contained in the document.

    for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp):
        interpreter.process_page(page)
        data =  retstr.getvalue()

    print data

if __name__ == '__main__':
    pdfparser(sys.argv[1])  

See below code that works for Python 3:

import sys
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from pdfminer.converter import XMLConverter, HTMLConverter, TextConverter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
import io

def pdfparser(data):

    fp = open(data, 'rb')
    rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
    retstr = io.StringIO()
    codec = 'utf-8'
    laparams = LAParams()
    device = TextConverter(rsrcmgr, retstr, codec=codec, laparams=laparams)
    # Create a PDF interpreter object.
    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
    # Process each page contained in the document.

    for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp):
        interpreter.process_page(page)
        data =  retstr.getvalue()

    print(data)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    pdfparser(sys.argv[1])  

Contra

this is the first snippet I've found that actually works with weird PDF files (particularly the free ebooks one can get from packtpub). Every other piece of code just return the weirdly encoded raw stuff but yours actually returns text. Thanks! – Mooring

You probably want to do retstr.seek(0) after getting data, or you'll accumulate text from all the pages. – Naomanaomi

To use with python3, besides the obvious parentheses after the print command, one has to replace the file command with open and import StringIO from the package io – Ewaewald

Wow. This block worked perfectly on the first time when I copied it in. Amazing! On to parsing and fixing the data and not having to stress over the inputting it. – Maymaya

pdfminer doesn't work for python3. this code doesn't work for pdfminer3k – Slotter

how to use it for aws lambda , when using it , it show the error import error – Feaster

This is the only answer that works. – Syllabogram

I have a pdf file that I want to read, how do i assign it to the 'data' variable? – Homestead

The code works with pdfminer.six (pdfminersix.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html). According to their docs, this is the current officially supported fork of the original pdfminer. – Paleogeography

Answer 4

Pdftotext An open source program (part of Xpdf) which you could call from python (not what you asked for but might be useful). I've used it with no problems. I think google use it in google desktop.

Hennessy

This seems to be the most useful of the tools listed here, with the -layout option to keep text in the same position as is in the PDF. Now if only I could figure out how to pipe the contents of a PDF into it. – Sop

After testing several solutions, this one seems like the simplest and most robust option. Can easily be wrapped by Python using a tempfile to dictate where the output is written to. – Sokul

Cerin, use '-' as a file name to redirect output to stdout. This way you can use simple subprocess.check_output and this call would feel like an internal function. – Milan

Just to re-enforce anyone who is using it . . . pdftotext seems to work very well, but it needs a second argument that is a hyphen, if you want to see the results on stdout. – Gorblimey

This will convert recursively all PDF files starting from the current folder: find . -iname "*.pdf" -exec pdftotext -enc UTF-8 -eol unix -raw {} \; By default the generated files take the original name with the .txt extension. – Plague

import subprocess subprocess.call(("pdftotext ... ).split()) – Nonprofessional

instead of executing the command line call in python, also this option that lets you use it a as library in python: github.com/jalan/pdftotext – Cribb

Answer 5

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.

Enchilada

no unicode support :( – Araujo

pyPdf does support UTF now. – Claymore

This library looks like garbage. Testing on a random PDF gives me the error "pyPdf.utils.PdfReadError: EOF marker not found" – Sokul

From the question: the text generated had no space between and was of no use. I used pyPDF and got the same result -- text is extracted with no spaces between words. – Transmitter

When I execute page.extractText() function I get the error 'TypeError: Can't convert 'bytes' object to str implicitly' How can I deal with that? – Shennashensi

Confirmed - no space between text. What on Earth... I think this library is only suitable for resizing, cropping, reordering etc. PDFminer seems a better bet. On Windows I've gotten these features through the (not free) Acrobat Pro (through its slightly awkward Javascript SDK), so even though not good enough for text it seems like good software. – Insider

I get ConvertFunctionsToVirtualList object is not callable – Greeley

how to get the appropriate spaces between them the output looks messy ? – Angio

The link shown above shows that the project is no longer supported and the link to the new author's github returns a 404. Out of date! "This page is no longer updated. I've stopped maintaining pyPdf, and a company named Phaseit has forked the project and continued development and maintenance with my blessing as pyPdf2 ( knowah.github.com/PyPDF2)." I think this answer should probably be downvoted to move it down the page. – Calycle

extractText() has issues. It doesn't work for every document. Please update the code if you have a stable solution. – Essene

Suggest to use pyPDF2 as per the SO post https://mcmap.net/q/87299/-unable-to-use-pypdf-module – Clearheaded

PyPDF2 recently got a huge update :-) – Reservoir

Answer 6

You can also quite easily use pdfminer as a library. You have access to the pdf's content model, and can create your own text extraction. I did this to convert pdf contents to semi-colon separated text, using the code below.

The function simply sorts the TextItem content objects according to their y and x coordinates, and outputs items with the same y coordinate as one text line, separating the objects on the same line with ';' characters.

Using this approach, I was able to extract text from a pdf that no other tool was able to extract content suitable for further parsing from. Other tools I tried include pdftotext, ps2ascii and the online tool pdftextonline.com.

pdfminer is an invaluable tool for pdf-scraping.

def pdf_to_csv(filename):
    from pdflib.page import TextItem, TextConverter
    from pdflib.pdfparser import PDFDocument, PDFParser
    from pdflib.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter

    class CsvConverter(TextConverter):
        def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
            TextConverter.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)

        def end_page(self, i):
            from collections import defaultdict
            lines = defaultdict(lambda : {})
            for child in self.cur_item.objs:
                if isinstance(child, TextItem):
                    (_,_,x,y) = child.bbox
                    line = lines[int(-y)]
                    line[x] = child.text

            for y in sorted(lines.keys()):
                line = lines[y]
                self.outfp.write(";".join(line[x] for x in sorted(line.keys())))
                self.outfp.write("\n")

    # ... the following part of the code is a remix of the 
    # convert() function in the pdfminer/tools/pdf2text module
    rsrc = PDFResourceManager()
    outfp = StringIO()
    device = CsvConverter(rsrc, outfp, "ascii")

    doc = PDFDocument()
    fp = open(filename, 'rb')
    parser = PDFParser(doc, fp)
    doc.initialize('')

    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrc, device)

    for i, page in enumerate(doc.get_pages()):
        outfp.write("START PAGE %d\n" % i)
        interpreter.process_page(page)
        outfp.write("END PAGE %d\n" % i)

    device.close()
    fp.close()

    return outfp.getvalue()

UPDATE:

The code above is written against an old version of the API, see my comment below.

Trusty

What kind of plugins do you need for that to work mate? I downloaded and installed pdfminer but it's not enough... – Limonene

The code above is written against an old version of PDFminer. The API has changed in more recent versions (for instance, the package is now pdfminer, not pdflib). I suggest you have a look at the source of pdf2txt.py in the PDFminer source, the code above was inspired by the old version of that file. – Trusty

Answer 7

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...'   

Tapes

I am getting an import error while executing "import slate": {File "C:\Python33\lib\site-packages\slate-0.3-py3.3.egg\slate_init_.py", line 48, in <module> ImportError: cannot import name PDF} But PDF class is there! Do you know how to solve this? – Shennashensi

No, this sounds very strange. Do you have the dependencies? – Tapes

Normally I get messages about missed dependencies, in this case I get the classic message "import slate File "C:\Python33\lib\site-packages\slate-0.3-py3.3.egg\slate_init_.py", line 48, in <module> ImportError: cannot import name PDF" – Shennashensi

Slate 0.3 requires pdfminer 20110515, according to this GitHub issue – Emeldaemelen

This package is no longer maintained. Refrain from using it. You can't even use it in Python 3.5 – Asel

Answer 8

I needed to convert a specific PDF to plain text within a python module. I used PDFMiner 20110515, after reading through their pdf2txt.py tool I wrote this simple snippet:

from cStringIO import StringIO
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, process_pdf
from pdfminer.converter import TextConverter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams

def to_txt(pdf_path):
    input_ = file(pdf_path, 'rb')
    output = StringIO()

    manager = PDFResourceManager()
    converter = TextConverter(manager, output, laparams=LAParams())
    process_pdf(manager, converter, input_)

    return output.getvalue() 

Binkley

def to_txt(pdf_path): – Gailey

if i wanted to only convert a certain number of pages, how would i do it with this code? – Connotation

@Connotation Have you tried using the pdf2txt tool? It seems to support that feature in the current version with the -p flag, implementation seems easy to follow and should be easy to customize too: github.com/euske/pdfminer/blob/master/tools/pdf2txt.py Hope it helps! :) – Binkley

thanx @Binkley , I tried for all of the above but your solution turns out to be perfect for me ,, output with spaces :) – Angio

pdf2txt.py is installed here for me: C:\Python27\Scripts\pdfminer\tools\pdf2txt.py – Guarino

Answer 9

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

Roentgenoscope

Answer 10

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.

Doublespace

Answer 11

Additionally there is PDFTextStream which is a commercial Java library that can also be used from Python.

Lilylilyan

Answer 12

I have used pdftohtml with the -xml argument, read the result with subprocess.Popen(), that will give you x coord, y coord, width, height, and font, of every snippet of text in the pdf. I think this is what 'evince' probably uses too because the same error messages spew out.

If you need to process columnar data, it gets slightly more complicated as you have to invent an algorithm that suits your pdf file. The problem is that the programs that make PDF files don't really necessarily lay out the text in any logical format. You can try simple sorting algorithms and it works sometimes, but there can be little 'stragglers' and 'strays', pieces of text that don't get put in the order you thought they would. So you have to get creative.

It took me about 5 hours to figure out one for the pdf's I was working on. But it works pretty good now. Good luck.

Faydra

Answer 13

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

Wakeful