What is the best way to extract data from a PDF?

What is the best PDF scraper?

I've been using ScraperWiki for a few years now and love it.

If you're interested in scraping PDFs, there's no reason to look elsewhere.

But I have a new friend who's just started using scrapers, and he's using ScraperWiki.e. I sent him a few links and questions and he wants to know the best way to use a PDF scraper.

As I've been using ScraperWiki for years, I thought it'd be good to share some of the things I learned about PDF scrapers. This is not a comprehensive guide on PDF scrapers, nor is it an endorsement of any particular scraper. Some of the items I'm sharing are from my own experiences, some are tips I've picked up from other scrapers, and some are just straight-up common sense. Here are the top 10 things I think you should know when using a PDF scraper: Understand how the PDF works. A PDF file is basically just a collection of different files. The different files are called objects and each object can be an image, text, form, vector graphic, or other kind of object.

PDF files are usually saved as compressed ZIP files. When you open a PDF in a web browser or other application, the browser or other app has to decompress the ZIP file, read the contents, and then re-compress the files into something it can display.

The process is a little more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it. There are different types of objects in PDFs. Most of them are text or vector graphics, but some of them are images.

PDFs are also very flexible. Some PDFs contain just one object, some PDFs contain many different kinds of objects, and some PDFs may even contain different versions of the same object.

If a scraper doesn't understand the format of a PDF, it won't be able to read the information it contains.

What is the best way to extract data from a PDF?

I have many scanned scans of maps that I am processing with PDFBox, using a simple script to open them all and copy the text.

What is the best way to extract data from these pdfs? I'd like to find the text and have it searchable, so something with a database integration is ideal (PostgreSQL, MySql, SQLite) but all forms are welcome as well. There are tables included with the PDFs so I imagine a solution could work like a document viewer, perhaps having a page graber plugin and the main page scanner.

Would this be an application or a plug-in? Thanks! Your problem looks much like the "Text in PDFs" topic from the developerWorks article below. There you can also find examples of the extraction. The simplest way would probably be to use iText, as is explained in the Text in PDFs page. That would give you something like PDFBox 2, in the sense that they try to do everything in C#. It's an open source project, and also opensource with the Eclipse plugin available, which includes the text extraction for you.

Or, if you are looking for a commercial solution, then there is pdftotext mentioned there, which converts PDF to text. A little searching shows up some examples for using it from java (or c#) programs.

EDIT. I didn't read your question before now, but here is something that might interest you. I can't vouch for it as I've not actually tried it (I don't really care about text in PDFs as far as programming things go, and am more about OCR'ing images), but I did look for a python library for handling text extraction from PDFs. The article provides a way of installing/using tesseract which is a good start for getting text from such files. The code provided isn't exactly pretty but may be useful to you.

What is the best tool to parse a PDF?

PDF files are generally pretty plain-text files, and some tools can do that out of the box.

Others require you to write some code to parse the text yourself, usually using a library such as librepo to access the content.

A common question I get is which tool to use to read PDFs. I'll cover some options and how you can find the best one for your own workflow.

PDF-parser.js is a great option, especially if you're not feeling like writing some JavaScript. You can install it from NPM or just get the binary from the project's website.js comes with some sample code to get you started, but ultimately you have to write some JavaScript yourself. It looks like this:

Var Parser = require('pdf-parser'); var pdf = new Parser(); pdf.embeddedFonts(); pdf.findText(); pdf.findWords(); pdf.splitText() pdf.isLink() pdf.findURLs() pdf.getLinksBySubstring() pdf.getLinksBySubstring(true) pdf.getLinksBySubstring(true, 2) pdf.findForms() pdf.getFormsBySubstring() pdf.findFields() pdf.getFieldsBySubstring() pdf.getFieldsBySubstring(true) pdf.findPages() pdf.getPagesBySubstring() pdf.getPagesBySubstring(true) pdf.getPagesBySubstring(true, 10) pdf.getPagesBySubstring(true, true, 10) pdf.getPagesBySubstring(true, true) pdf.findImages() pdf.getImagesBySubstring() pdf.getImagesBySubstring(true) pdf.