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noorullahe has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi all, I need to extract text from PDF. I used CAM::PDF, PDF::API2. But all returns non-ascii characters, lower case letters to uppercase and each and every letter contains spaces. Kindly do the needful.

Regards,

Noorullah

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Extract text from PDF (normal text)
by Ratazong (Monsignor) on Oct 15, 2009 at 06:25 UTC
    Hi!
    It's in the nature of PDF that text isn't represented by a sequence of letters, but that each letter may be positioned in the document separately; the order of the letters/words inside the .pdf-file has to be in no relation to the order the text appears on the screen.
    This makes parsing .pdf-files extremely difficult.
    I used a program called pdftext.exe (which works quite well extracting whole words (at least in most cases)) and post-processed the result with perl.
    maybe its worth a try for you also...
    HTH, Rata
[reply]
Re: Extract text from PDF (normal text)
by leocharre (Priest) on Oct 15, 2009 at 20:01 UTC
[reply]
Re: Extract text from PDF (normal text)
by xbmy (Friar) on Jun 09, 2010 at 21:33 UTC

    Try this, it works well for me, enjoy!

    use warnings;
use CAM::PDF;
use CAM::PDF::PageText;

my $infile = "?.pdf"; #the pdf file you want to extract
my $outfile = "out.txt";

open (OUTFILE, ">>out.txt") or die("cannot open file : $!");

my $pdf = CAM::PDF->new($infile) || die "$CAM::PDF::errstr\n";
my $num = $pdf->numPages();
foreach my $p (1..$num) # p present for the page number
{
my $str = $pdf->getPageText($p);
CAM::PDF->asciify(\$str);
print OUTFILE "$str\n"; # write to file
}
close (OUTFILE);

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Extract text from PDF (normal text)
by LanX (Saint) on Jun 10, 2010 at 11:03 UTC
[reply]

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