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Re: CAM::PDF extract text and their coordinates from pdf..

by snoopy (Deacon)
on Jan 09, 2013 at 22:08 UTC ( #1012577=note: print w/ replies, xml ) Need Help??

in reply to CAM::PDF extract text and their coordinates from pdf..

I've previously written a rendering class that does does just that:

package PDF::ToText; use 5.006; use warnings; use strict; use CAM::PDF; use CAM::PDF::GS; use base qw(CAM::PDF::GS); =head1 NAME PDF::ToText - CAM::PDF renderer to extract PDF Text and position infor +mation =head1 VERSION Version 0.01 =cut our $VERSION = '0.01'; =head1 SYNOPSIS use CAM::PDF; use PDF::ToText; my $pdf = CAM::PDF->new($filename); my $contentTree = $pdf->getPageContentTree(1); $contentTree->render("PDF::ToText"); =head1 SUBROUTINES/METHODS =head2 renderText =cut sub _textToDevice { my $self = shift; my @t2u = $self->textToUser( @_ ); my @t2d = $self->userToDevice( @t2u); return @t2d; } sub renderText { my $self = shift; my $string = shift; my $width = shift; # collect vertices of this text segment. my @bottom_left = $self->_textToDevice(0, 0); my @bottom_right = $self->_textToDevice($width, 0); my @top_left = $self->_textToDevice(0, $self->{Tfs}); my @top_right = $self->_textToDevice($width, $self->{Tfs}); printf "%7.2f %7.2f %7.2f %7.2f %s\n", @bottom_left, @top_right, $s +tring; return; }
It's a drop in replacement for CAM::PDF::PageText.

In it's current state, it dumps text coordinates to STDOUT; but it can be easily amended to collect them in a global variable or whatever (CAM::PDF doesn't currently support the passing of handles).

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Re^2: CAM::PDF extract text and their coordinates from pdf..
by umesh_epub (Novice) on Jan 10, 2013 at 05:39 UTC
    Hi Snoopy,
    Thanks for your kind replay. How to know line start and line end.
    Which material we have to study for doing pdf operations.
      Hi Umesh,

      Yes, that's the same point that I got to.

      In practice, you end up with a lot of text fragments that need to be reassembled into words and lines. Putting these back together into words and lines is a fair bit of work and can involve some heuristics.

      Rather than continuing to develop the above, I personally went with pstotext from the Ghostscript suite; it has a `-bboxes` option to output text positions and does attempt to assemble words and lines. Despite it's name it will work on pdf files.

      Another program I looked at was pdfminer.

      One of these, or something similar, might work. It's just a matter of how good a job they do.

      - David

        Thanks David

        I will look pdfminer and pstotext

        I have searched pstotext in my Ghostscript "GPL Ghostscript 8.70 (2009-07-31)" But that command is not available.

        In which version of the GS "pstotext" available.


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