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ateague's scratchpad

by ateague (Monk)
on Mar 10, 2009 at 19:57 UTC ( [id://749712]=scratchpad: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

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>

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;
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