I regularly receive large numbers of the same PDF form. I want to extract the data from them into a text file. I'd like to do this via a script of some sort. I'm working in a UNIX environment.
Is this possible? I've googled my brains out and can't find anything.
Text in PDF is represented by text elements in page content streams. The streams are commonly compressed. If you have the time and resources you can use ISO 32000-1:2008 or Adobe PDF 1.7 specification to build your own PDF parser. Or it may be more practical to use a 3rd party app as an intermediate translation step.
There are utilities that will decode the stream and give you clear text. One option is PDFtk Server which will work in your environment. Another option is to use the Poppler PDF Rendering Library which has a command line utility "pdftotext" useful for searching for strings in PDFs.
Related
We parse a good number of PDFs, from many vendors. The PDFs are similar, but not exactly the same and things are not always in an exact same position on the same page. Some cases we are able to parse via getting the Strings from the PDF and checkboxes are Unicode. However, many vendors are not using Unicode so an image. These are never forms. So if I use iText to OCR the whole document, what does it produce for these checkboxes? Such that I can look for that and see if a checkbox is checked or not? Or am I just out of luck and the only way the data gets into our application is through manual entry? Thanks.
I have a .rtf file that I need to display within a JavaFX GUI.
My research indicates that the JavaFX TextFlow supports rich text through a tree of Node objects. However, I am at a loss on how to get my .rtf file represented as this tree of Nodes.
I feel like there should be an intuitive way to parse the .rtf file into the Node tree, but I just can't seem to find a way to do it!
Parsing RTF and Rendering in a TextFlow
You could parse the rtf and generate a TextFlow representation of it (similar as is done for this markdown editor for markdown markup). I believe this would be a difficult task for you (the RTF 1.9.1 specification is 277 pages long). Describing how to do this would be too long and complicated for a StackOverflow answer (even if I could describe it, which I probably could not).
Converting RTF to a format JavaFX can more easily render
I suggest using a converter (either offline or using an online service) to convert your RTF to another format before trying to render it in JavaFX. If you know the documents in advance you can pre-convert before shipping your application, if you don't then you will have to provide a real-time conversion facility with your application. I won't recommend a particular service, but you can google and do some research on RTF conversion to see if there is one that fits. As a target format you could choose PDF or HTML, or an image (e.g. PNG).
JavaFX will natively display:
Images using an ImageView.
HTML using a WebView.
A 3rd party library can be used to display PDF documents or other formats using JavaFX.
We are developing a Java application that needs to programmatically convert .rtf, .doc and .docx files to PDF files.
Formatting is important to us, so we need the page numbers to be the same between a source file and a target PDF file, and the contents of each page being the same as the original file.
We have tried out open source solutions, such as JODConverter to invoke a LibreOffice of OpenOffice installation, Docx4j and XDocReport. The best formatting was achieved with LibreOffice. However, even in that case, the pages were different (for example, a 87-page .rtf file results in an 80-page PDF file).
So, we think that the ideal way to make the conversion would be to somehow invoke Microsoft Word though our Java application, and make the conversion with it. That would produce PDF files that have the same formatting as the original files.
Is this possible in any of the following ways:
An API that is directly invokeable through Java?
An API that is invokeable through a .Net language and we would use that with something like JACOB?
A 3rd party library that uses a Microsoft Word installation under the hood (something like JODConverter for Word)?
A CLI interface supported by Word (relevant question)?
Something else?
Is there any clear and proper process to convert a pdf file into a word file with all formatting and images in asp.net web application?
The best way to do that is by using the OCR. It will recognize the text and the images in the PDF file, and then you can save it on a DOC file. I know a third party toolkit named leadtools that should help you doing your requirements, since it support the ASP.NET environment. You can check their Online OCR Demo
Also, you can check their website for more information, or contact their support team.
PDF is a presentational format where all the content is placed by absolute positions. There are no paragraphs and other structured elements (unless it is a Tagged PDF). Technically, you can output every word character by character in any order, but visually it would look like a normal text. Thus, to make a proper conversion to word it is required to do content recognition or some kind of OCR (e.g. ABBYY FineReader)
There are some paid components on the market that allow to do text extraction and some do converting pages to images (obviously, this is not a desired approach for converting into word).
I have a requirement to read a pdf file having tabular format data only like in excel file. I need to extract the cell value of given pdf file.
Is it be anyhow possible using itext API. If you have something to share then please share it or any other solutions?
The PDF format is just a canvas where text and graphics are placed without any structure information. As such there aren't any iText-objects in a PDF file. In each page there will probably be a number of Strings, but you can't reconstruct a phrase or a paragraph using these strings. There are probably a number of lines drawn, but you can't retrieve a Table-object based on these lines.
In short: parsing the content of a PDF-file is NOT POSSIBLE with iText.
You can try this! This lets you read PDF pages.
I recently ran into this problem. I wasn't able to make it work with itext.
An alternate solution I found was to open a PDF document in Adobe and export it to xml. At least with my PDF's it preserved the table information and then I was able to programmatically work with the XML to generate tabular files like excel etc.
The other issue I ran into was that Adobe only lets you export one file at a time and I had lots of files. Luckily Adobe also has a merge function. I ended up merging all the files together and then exporting them as one big XML file and working with that file to generate what I needed.