Why not have a chat with perlPsycho? He seems a little farther on than you are with How to Extract PDF tables using Perl

hippo++ for subtle irony! xD

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
Je suis Charlie!}

Do you have a (small) anonymized PDF sample we can look at? Is the PDF text even searchable and selectable in a PDF viewer?

At $WORK I use pdftohtml with the following command line: pdftohtml.exe -xml -stdout -zoom 1.4 [PDF FILE]

This will rip out all the text elements into an XML file with attributes for the font, x/y position on the page and text length. (-zoom 1.4 makes the positioning units 100 dpi, -stdout streams the output to STDOUT instead of writing it to a file).

Here is an example of what I typically work with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE pdf2xml SYSTEM "pdf2xml.dtd">

<pdf2xml> 
<page number="1" position="absolute" top="0" left="0" height="1100" wi
+dth="850">
    <fontspec id="0" size="17" family="Times" color="#000000"/>
 <text top="103" left="115" width="602" height="18" font="0">XXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</text>
 <text top="120" left="115" width="602" height="18" font="0">XXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</text>
 <text top="186" left="115" width="103" height="18" font="0">ROUTE TO:
+</text>
 <text top="186" left="265" width="107" height="17" font="0">Audit Bil
+ling</text>
 <text top="220" left="115" width="128" height="18" font="0">SORT GROU
+P:</text>
 <text top="220" left="265" width="152" height="18" font="0">Invoice S
+ort Group</text>
 <text top="286" left="115" width="260" height="18" font="0">OH_GOD_IT
+_BURNS 2013-12-20</text>
 <text top="286" left="415" width="71" height="18" font="0">23:53:04</
+text>
 <text top="286" left="545" width="108" height="18" font="0">FOOBAR</t
+ext>
 <text top="320" left="115" width="602" height="18" font="0">XXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</text>
 <text top="336" left="115" width="602" height="18" font="0">XXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</text>
</page>
/<pdf2html>
[download]

I can then use XML::Twig with XPath expressions to pull the exact xml nodes I want:

open (my $XML, "-|", "pdftohtml.exe -xml -zoom 1.4 -stdout $PDF_FILE")
+ or die "$!\n$^E";

    # We are only interested in the text for the "ROUTE TO:" and "SORT
+ GROUP:" sections
    # Set the twig_handlers to extract the <text> nodes of interest; a
+ll other nodes will be ignored
    # XPath queries provide an extra 1/20 inch padding on all sides to
+ take font and rendering variations into account
    my $t = XML::Twig->new(
        twig_handlers => {
            '//text[(@top >= 180 and @top <= 190) and (@left >= 100 an
+d @left <= 111)]' => \&RouteTo,
            '//text[(@top >= 215 and @top <= 225) and (@left >= 260 an
+d @left <= 270)]' => \&InvoiceSort,
        },
        comments     => 'drop',  # remove any comments
        empty_tags   => 'normal',# empty tags = <tag/>
    );
    
    $t->parse($XML);
    $t->purge;
    
    close $XML;
[download]

Hi perlmad,

I am afraid that is a non-trivial task. To know why, please read the following node by almut: Re: CAM::PDF did't extract all pdf's content

I made good experiences by using an external pdf2txt-converter and the parsing the output - but this of course depends on your input-document.

HTH, Rata

I made good experiences by using an external pdf2txt-converter and the parsing the output - but this of course depends on your input-document.

As a side note, if you go down this route, make absolutely certain that your external program will extract the text with some sort of X/Y position.

Unless you have full and complete control over the PDF and its generation, parsing PDF text by fixed position row/column is pretty much guaranteed to end in failure, frustration, and an absolutely massive nest of exceptions and special parsing cases

Similar question from yesterday, are perlmad and perlPsycho the same person?

no marto , I don't know who is he

I have checked all the ways to read pdf file but i Couldn't get anything , I missed to mention that the pdf file table contain background color and text color

Is this possible to read only table data from pdf