PDFLayoutTextStripper
Data
pdf text extraction
SHOW HN2017
How HN took it
8 positive, 16 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 6 critical, out of 30 comments about the project. Thread score +0.03.
Idea: 3 for, 3 againstExecution: 1 for, 2 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
PDFBox is a solid base for PDF parsing
From 2 comments
Nice. I recently got very familiar with PDFBox and parsing complex layouts - it is a great library.
robinhowlett on HNFun, I did the same thing as a clojure repl exploration to pipe PDF text to a bare Swing GUI (I know, a little absurd in a way). The deja vu made squint for a minute. ps: pdfbox…
agumonkey on HN
Objections
PDF text extraction is inherently hard and copy-paste from PDF often yields garbage
From 3 comments
PDF is not very fine. Copy-paste from PDF very often results in complete rubbish, even when it is not deliberately prevented (which the format allows, and then you have to do OCR).
ptaipale on HNHave you ever actually tried to parse PDF with software? It's a sheer nightmare. PDF often gets produced from text processors that have very rich format information. PDF strips…
maxxxxx on HNI had used the xpdf [1] package, a C library and a set of CLI tools (mentioned by others in this thread too, and which the pdftotext command-line utility and xppdf/pdftotext…
vram22 on HN
Only handles tables, unlike Tabula, per maker's own comparison
From 1 comment
I didn't know about Tabula and i've given a try at the instant. Apparently it only extracts tables and ignores everything around. This might be good in some cases but it is a…
jlink on HN
Requests
Support for empty table cells
From 1 comment
Although I haven't tested this yet, these utilities tend to fail when fed a table with empty cells.
curiousgal on HN
PDF to HTML conversion with correct line breaks
From 1 comment
Is there a PDF to HTML converter which can consistently get line breaks right?
Animats on HN
Combine with OCR engines for layout analysis
From 1 comment
Fairly frequently, OCR engines are posted here. But almost without exception, they lack layout analysis, which renders them largely useless. Is this something that could be…
WalterGR on HN
Questions
Does it work better than pdftotext --layout?
From 1 comment
Curious if this works better than the pdftotext utility that comes in the Debian poppler-utils package. That has a --layout option that works really well sometimes and really…
tyingq on HN
Does it keep both layout and SHA-1 hash?
From 1 comment
But does it keep both the layout and Sha-1 hash? Not sure it's HN worthy otherwise.
kzrdude on HN
Alternatives named
Tabula
From 1 comment
For those interested in converting PDF tables into CSV, there's also Tabula ( http://tabula.technology/ ) (Used by many journalists to analyze the data in PDFs)
nemild on HN
pdftotext (xpdf / poppler)
From 2 comments
Curious if this works better than the pdftotext utility that comes in the Debian poppler-utils package. That has a --layout option that works really well sometimes and really…
tyingq on HNAlso available for windows and mac at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html
dmoo on HN
docparser.com
From 1 comment
check docparser.com
2_listerine_pls on HN
pdf.co
From 1 comment
Tabula is the nice free tool but requires technical background to run it. There is a free https://pdf.co with both online and offline tools (Windows) for PDF to CSV. (disclaimer:…
eumm on HN