PDFMiner

Python PDF parser and analyzer

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<!-- hhmts start --> Last Modified: Sun Jul 12 00:36:44 JST 2009 <!-- hhmts end -->

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What's It?

PDFMiner is a suite of programs that help extracting and analyzing text data of PDF documents. Unlike other PDF-related tools, it allows to obtain the exact location of texts in a page, as well as other extra information such as font information or ruled lines. It includes a PDF converter that can transform PDF files into other text formats (such as HTML). It has an extensible PDF parser that can be used for other purposes instead of text analysis.

Features:

• Written entirely in Python. (version 2.4 or newer required)
• PDF-1.7 specification support. (well, almost)
• Non-ASCII languages and vertical writing scripts support.
• Various font types (Type1, TrueType, Type3, and CID) support.
• Basic encryption (RC4) support.
• PDF to HTML conversion (with a sample converter web app).
• Outline (TOC) extraction.
• Tagged contents extraction.
• Infer text running by using clustering technique.

Download:
http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/pdfminer-dist-20090711.tar.gz (1.8Mbytes)

Discussion: (for questions and comments, post here)
http://groups.google.com/group/pdfminer-users/

View the source:
http://code.google.com/p/pdfminerr/source/browse/trunk/pdfminer

Online Demonstration: (pdf -> html conversion webapp)
http://pdf2html.tabesugi.net:8080/

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How to Install

1. Install Python 2.4 or newer.
2. Download the PDFMiner source .
3. Extract it.
4. Run setup.py to install:
   

   # python setup.py install
   
   
   

5. Do the following test:
   

   $ pdf2txt.py samples/simple1.pdf
   
   
   
   
   Hello
   
   World
   
    Hello  World
   

6. Done!

 

For non-ASCII languages

In order to handle non-ASCII languages (e.g. Japanese), you need to install an additional data called CMap , which is distributed from Adobe.

Here is how:

1. Get a CMap archive file from http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/pub/CMap.tar.bz2
2. Expand the archive and put the CMap directory under the directory where pdfminer is installed. (Normally this should be something like /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages .) For example:

   $ cd /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages
   
   
   $ tar jxf CMap.tar.bz2
   
   
   

3. Do the following. (this is optional, but highly recommended)
   

   $ python -m pdfminer.cmap
   
   
   

   This may take several minutes.

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How to Use

PDFMiner comes with two handy tools: pdf2txt.py and dumppdf.py .

pdf2txt.py

pdf2txt.py extracts text contents from a PDF file. It extracts all the texts that are to be rendered programmatically, It cannot recognize texts drawn as images that would require optical character recognition. It also extracts the corresponding locations, font names, font sizes, writing direction (horizontal or vertical) for each text portion. You need to provide a password for protected PDF documents when its access is restricted. You cannot extract any text from a PDF document which does not have extraction permission.

For non-ASCII languages, you can specify the output encoding (such as UTF-8).

Note: Not all characters in a PDF can be safely converted to Unicode.

Examples:

$ pdf2txt.py samples/naacl06-shinyama.pdf -o output.html


(extract text as an HTML file whose filename is output.html)

$ pdf2txt.py -c GBK samples/jo.pdf -o output.html


(extract a Chinese HTML file in vertical writing, CMap is required)

$ pdf2txt.py -P mypassword secret.pdf -o output.txt


(extract a text from an encrypted PDF file)

Options:

-o filename

Specifies the output file name. By default, it prints the extracted contents to stdout in text format.

 

-p pageno[,pageno,...]

Specifies the comma-separated list of the page numbers to be extracted. Page numbers are starting from one. By default, it extracts texts from all the pages.

 

-c codec

Specifies the output codec for non-ASCII texts.

 

-t type

Specifies the output format. The following formats are currently supported.

• html : HTML format. (Default)
• text : TEXT format.
• sgml : SGML format.
• tag : "Tagged PDF" format. A tagged PDF has its own contents annotated with HTML-like tags. pdf2txt tries to extract its content streams rather than inferring its text locations. Tags used here are defined in the PDF specification (See §10.7 "Tagged PDF ").

 

-M char_margin

-L line_margin

-W word_margin

These are the parameters used for layout analysis. In an actual PDF file, texts might be split into several chunks in the middle of its running, depending on the authoring software. Therefore, text extraction needs to splice text chunks. In the figure below, two text chunks whose distance is closer than the char_margin (shown as M ) is considered continuous and get grouped into one. Also, two lines whose distance is closer than the line_margin (L ) is grouped as a text box, which is a rectangular area that contains a "cluster" of texts. Furthermore, it may be required to insert blank characters (spaces) as necessary if the distance between two words is greater than the word_margin (W ), as a blank between words might not be represented as a space, but indicated by the positioning of each word.

Each value is specified not as an actual length, but as a proportion of the length to the size of each character in question. The default values are M = 1.0, L = 0.3, and W = 0.2, respectively.

→

← M

Q u i

c k

b r o w

n   f o x

↓

→

← W

L

j u m p s

...

↑

 

-s scale

Specifies the output scale. Can be used in HTML format only.

 

-m maxpages

Specifies the maximum number of pages to extract. By default, it extracts all the pages in a document.

 

-P password

Provides the user password to access PDF contents.

 

-C CMap directory

Specifies the path of CMap directory. CMap is needed when extracting non-ASCII texts (especially in Asian languages). The CMap location can be also specified with CMAP_PATH environment variable.

 

-d

Increases the debug level.

dumppdf.py

dumppdf.py dumps the internal contents of a PDF file in pseudo-XML format. This program is primarily for debugging purpose, but it's also possible to extract some meaningful contents (such as images).

Examples:

$ dumppdf.py -a foo.pdf


(dump all the headers and contents, except stream objects)

$ dumppdf.py -T foo.pdf


(dump the table of contents)

$ dumppdf.py -r -i6 foo.pdf > pic.jpeg


(extract a JPEG image)

Options:

-a

Instructs to dump all the objects. By default, it only prints the document trailer (like a header).

 

-i objno,objno, ...

Specifies PDF object IDs to display. Comma-separated IDs, or multiple -i options are accepted.

 

-p pageno,pageno, ...

Specifies the page number to be extracted. Comma-separated page numbers, or multiple -p options are accepted. Note that page numbers start from one, not zero.

 

-r (raw)

-b (binary)

-t (text)

Specifies the output format of stream contents. Because the contents of stream objects can be very large, they are omitted when none of the options above is specified.

With -r option, the "raw" stream contents are dumped without decompression. With -b option, the decompressed contents are dumped as a binary blob. With -t option, the decompressed contents are dumped in a text format, similar to repr() manner. When -r or -b option is given, no stream header is displayed for the ease of saving it to a file.

 

-T

Shows the table of contents.

 

-P password

Provides the user password to access PDF contents.

 

-d

Increases the debug level.

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Changes

• 2009/07/11: Improvement in layout analysis. Thanks to Lubos Pintes.
• 2009/05/17: Bugfixes, massive code restructuring, and simple graphic element support added. setup.py is supported.
• 2009/03/30: Text output mode added.
• 2009/03/25: Encoding problems fixed. Word splitting option added.
• 2009/02/28: Robust handling of corrupted PDFs. Thanks to Troy Bollinger.
• 2009/02/01: Various bugfixes. Thanks to Hiroshi Manabe.
• 2009/01/17: Handling a trailer correctly that contains both /XrefStm and /Prev entries.
• 2009/01/10: Handling Type3 font metrics correctly.
• 2008/12/28: Better handling of word spacing. Thanks to Christian Nentwich.
• 2008/09/06: A sample pdf2html webapp added.
• 2008/08/30: ASCII85 encoding filter support.
• 2008/07/27: Tagged contents extraction support.
• 2008/07/10: Outline (TOC) extraction support.
• 2008/06/29: HTML output added. Reorganized the directory structure.
• 2008/04/29: Bugfix for Win32. Thanks to Chris Clark.
• 2008/04/27: Basic encryption and LZW decoding support added.
• 2008/01/07: Several bugfixes. Thanks to Nick Fabry for his contribution.
• 2007/12/31: Initial release.
• 2004/12/24: Start writing the code out of boredom...

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Related Projects

• pyPdf
• xpdf
• pdfbox

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Terms and Conditions

Copyright (c) 2004-2009 Yusuke Shinyama <yusuke at cs dot nyu dot edu>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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Yusuke Shinyama