#111 Text Extraction with Formatting

Is it possible to extract text from a PDF without
ignoring the formatting?

HTML tags might be used for example. I thought the
PDFText2Html class would do the trick but it does not.
Thank you for reading.

[Ben Litchfield]

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HTML tags are not used to format a PDF document. Font information is available but can be tricky to get what you
want. You will need to extend PDFTextStripper and override writeCharacters to get formatting such as bold/italic.
Is that what you are looking for?

Ben

[Anonymous]

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That's exactly what I am looking for. But is this not a
priority issue for the PDFBox package? It would take me
quite a time to extend the stripper on my own. One of the
PDFBox developers might do it better I think.

If you insist that it's a user's issue and PDFBox developers
would not invest their time in such an extension, could you
at least tell me whether you have any links to any
information regarding this matter?

[Ben Litchfield]

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Specifically are you looking only for bold & italic or other things?

[Anonymous]

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Uhmm... well bold, italic, underlined etc... would be a good
beginning but my ultimate wish would be something like
quoted below:

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

<pdf2xml>
<page number="1" position="absolute" top="0" left="0"
height="1262" width="892">
<fontspec id="0" size="16" family="Times" color="#000000"/>
<fontspec id="1" size="16" family="Times" color="#000000"/>
<fontspec id="2" size="16" family="Times" color="#000000"/>
<text top="110" left="106" width="137" height="18"
font="0"><i>She </i>told <b>me</b>. äµß </text>
</page>
</pdf2xml>

I think I have made a mistake by naming it "Text Extraction
with Formatting"... I should have put my question under a
more fitting title, something like "PDF to (HTML/)XML
Conversion with formatting".

Thank you very much for your prompt replies. ^_^

[Raimi Rufai]

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Hi Ben,
<p>
I've extended PDFText2Html to handle bold, new lines (with &lt;br&gt; tags). However, I'm having trouble figuring out how to handle underlines.
</p>

<p>
Also, I don't know how to post updates.
</p>

Regards,

Raimi

[Anonymous]

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@ rrufai
what is the trouble you have with handling underlines?

You might send a compiled 32-bit windows or linux binary personally to me. (I'm a user of pdftohtml.)

[Anonymous]

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@ rruffai

> You might send a compiled 32-bit windows or linux binary personally to me.
> (I'm a user of pdftohtml.)

I messed things up. This was also PDFBox. Hehe, sorry.

[Raimi Rufai]

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What email address should I send it to?

[Raimi Rufai]

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It's sent.

[Ben Litchfield]

PDFBox has moved to Apache. Please log issue there.

http://pdfbox.apache.org