Which is the best PDF scraper?

Can you scrape data from a PDF?

After looking at the source code, it appears that they use JavaScript to accomplish this. It's not super-easy to see but they're using something like. To me it looks like this is a very dirty hack. The fact that there are multiple "frames" (iframes) in this approach is also problematic because if I have a browser with multiple iframes open, it can cause issues.

That said, I'm sure there are some ways of doing it cleanly with either a Chrome extension, the PDF viewer or both.

What is PDF scraper?

What is this technology? How it works?

PDF scraping is the usage of software designed to extract data from a PDF document, in order to perform some specific tasks. There are more than 800 million PDF documents all around the world and about 30 billion pages have been printed every year! That's huge and impressive. Unfortunately, most of those pages contain only useless information; they're never read by humans.

Let's go back to our example: If you want to know how many copies of a book have been printed until now, you would scan each page of the PDF file and add all the numbers together. This would take hundreds of hours if you only wanted to get a rough idea.

Why do we need these data when there are so many PDF files everywhere? Because, you know, we live in the Information Age. PDF Scraper, for those who don't know, is a piece of software that can parse and transform a PDF document into another one of your choice. In our case, this would be the spreadsheet or any other format suitable for our needs. The process is very similar to the process of Scrapping an image or a web page. We also refer to that technique as: Reflow. It's not the only way but the cheapest and the easiest to perform when it comes to big file size and the number of pages involved.

Scrapping in the real world. When we talk about PDF scraping, most people think about the images of their websites being repainted (which is done with HTML or CSS). Those images look great but there's no use of that data, right? We're not going to dig deep into the topic because it would take an entire blog post (I had already planned it while writing this article, that's why the beginning is not too detailed) but it's important to know that there is an alternative! When you want to use images in a page, the correct way is using a element that will load them from different sources. Those sources could be anything from databases (ex: a website), to CDNs (ex: Google's Images) to an API. Using these methods make sure that the data is properly used as the source could change as time goes by.

We can apply that approach to PDFs too.

Which is the best PDF scraper?

There are many tools that you can use to scrape content out of a PDF, or even a search engine. The tool I used in this tutorial is actually quite powerful, and it works for most formats, including the new Office 365 document type: DOCX . In fact, Office 365 allows you to share documents just like any other format, so it's worth checking if they will still be readable before you decide whether to save them. To use the tool, you simply point it to the web address of a PDF file. It will then convert and save the content into various formats and upload them to your Google Drive folder. You can see some of the output from my test below.

What is the difference between a PDF stripper and a PDF converter? Some of these tools act more like a converter; they change the way a PDF file looks, depending on whether the output format requires the layout of the original PDF. Others act like scrapers. A PDF scraper converts the content of a document to the same format as the original, allowing you to make changes to it if you like, then send it back to the original web site to be saved. A converter on the other hand gives you a completely different file in a new format.

I have chosen my favourite based on my own requirements. I think one of the best features of the converter is its ability to save directly to Office 365, which meant I did not have to convert the file manually. I have created a few samples in the table at the end of the tutorial. Office 365 lets you read and edit DOCX files, but you cannot convert a file like this from the web, or upload files to it. Office 365 is the perfect solution to read and edit this file type, although you can still print or save a document.

Another advantage of the converter is the ability to crop an image, without losing its quality. This is a little trickier to find with the rest, but even if you crop a document in the scrapers, they will usually try to save the original document. My recommendation is therefore the PDF Scraper Pro because it saves out the original document, even if you're cropping the picture. Also, if you want to add watermarks and images, this one does them well too.

Why do we need to save a document to Office 365?