PDF Parsing Using Python - extracting formatted and plain texts

Question

I m looking for a PDF library which will allow me to extract the text from a PDF document  I ve looked at PyPDF  and this can extract the text from a PDF document very nicely  The problem with this is that if there are tables in the document  the text in the tables is extracted in-line with the rest of the document text  This can be problematic because it produces sections of text that aren t useful and look garbled  for instance  lots of numbers mashed together    I d like to extract the text from a PDF document  excluding any tables and special formatting  Is there a library out there that does this

User · Answer

That s a difficult problem to solve since visually similar PDFs may have a wildly differing structure depending on how they were produced  In the worst case the library would need to basically act like an OCR  On the other hand  the PDF may contain sufficient structure and metadata for easy removal of tables and figures  which the library can be tailored to take advantage of   I m pretty sure there are no open source tools which solve your problem for a wide variety of PDFs  but I remember having heard of commercial software claiming to do exactly what you ask for  I m sure you ll run into them while googling

User · Answer

You can also take a look at PDFMiner  or for older versions of Python see PDFMiner and PDFMiner   A particular feature of interest in PDFMiner is that you can control how it regroups text parts when extracting them  You do this by specifying the space between lines  words  characters  etc  So  maybe by tweaking this you can achieve what you want  that depends of the variability of your documents   PDFMiner can also give you the location of the text in the page  it can extract data by Object ID and other stuff  So dig in PDFMiner and be creative  But your problem is really not an easy one to solve because  in a PDF  the text is not continuous  but made from a lot of small groups of characters positioned absolutely in the page  The focus of PDF is to keep the layout intact  It s not content oriented but presentation oriented

[python] PDF Parsing Using Python - extracting formatted and plain texts

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