Which is better, PDFMiner or pdfplumber?
We're asked this question a lot.
The short answer is it depends on what you want to do with the PDF and for what price. The longer answer is that it really depends on what you want to do with the PDFs.
PDFMiner has the ability to extract text, signatures, comments, links, bookmarks, fonts, images, PDF forms content, PDF form fields, PDF form data and PDF form meta data. PDFplumber only allows extraction of form fields, including password protected fields.
What is in a PDF? It starts with an AcroForm. An AcroForm is a set of metadata, form properties and form fields that are stored in a PDF document. A PDF form can be used to create a form for a web site or mobile app, for example, by creating a PDF form that can be embedded on a web page. Another example of a PDF form is the form used to download an ebook from Amazon. You fill in the form and the ebook is available for you to download. The information entered into the form is stored within the file along with the book itself. In this example, the form would be embedded in the ebook as an attachment.
The actual form is contained within the PDF document itself. That way, no matter how the PDF is displayed - whether on your desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile device, the form can be displayed and used.
The AcroForm data consists of: Fields (names and values);. Form elements (labels and fields);. AcroForm metadata (attributes such as title, creator, subject, keywords, etc.) PDFMiner automatically parses the PDF to extract the fields and metadata. This makes the process simple.
PDFMiner is capable of extracting PDF forms created with Adobe Reader version 9 and newer. It does not extract PDF forms created with Adobe Reader 6 or 7. PDFplumber is capable of extracting PDF forms created with Adobe Reader 6 and 7.
How do I use it? Using PDFMiner, a typical workflow looks like this: Browse the PDF and find a form you want to extract;. Select the form, then right click, select Extract and choose the type of information you want from the dropdown box.
How to use Python PDFMiner?
In a PDF document, every text string is an element of the page content stream.
You can use this to extract text strings from your PDF documents. All PDFMiner functions will start with the function PDFMiner.findelementsofstring() .
Let's see an example, in order to get information about different elements on the page. PDFMiner.findelementsofstring("Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet") This function will take several arguments: The PDF path . The name of the element to look for (as a string).
To do this, you have to call findelementsofstring() first. Then, you give the path of the PDF file and the name of the element that you want to look for. In this case, we are looking for the name of the page. If you did not provide an argument, you will look for the text in every element.
In the code below, we can see the result of the search:
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