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Ask HN: Any software to parse a PDF word by word? (maybe into SVG)

4 points by heliodor ↗ HN
I'm looking for a library or software to convert a PDF into SVG where the SVG renders the text grouped word by word.

I've seen the software pdf2svg produces an SVG where everything in the PDF is rendered into individual shapes. Each letter becomes a shape! So that's too fine-grained.

Inkscape produces groups of words and can't break it down further.

Anything else out there that can actually figure out the individual words in my PDF?

Actually, I'd be okay with parsing the PDF and getting a list of words and their positions. No need for the SVG.

Any suggestions?

7 comments

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MaDeuce
Here are a couple of ideas, none of which do exactly what you want. However, they may give you some ideas...

PDFMiner[1] is a python toolkit for PDF. Among other things, it extracts text from PDF files. It also has a tool that lets you find objects and their coordinates in a PDF file. I have not looked at the latter functionality, but it may get you your words and locations.

I've used Tesseract[2] to convert scanned documents into searchable PDF files. Since a search of the PDF file will highlight matching words in the scanned document, it clearly knows where words are and the letters that comprise them. This might be another approach.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/wiki/ReadMe [2] https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/wiki/ReadMe

brudgers
Because PDF's can contain typesetting glyphs or even bitmap images, probably the only universal way to extract text from arbitrary PDF's is OCR. On the other hand, if you can make assumptions about the data and the data is clean enough that the assumptions hold, then other methods might work. But if the data is that clean then OCR probably will too. And OCR is as easy as a $79 all in one to get started with.

Good luck.

vram22
I worked on a project for a client some time ago [1] where extraction of text from PDFs was a big part of it. Researched several products, tried them, settled on xpdf - the C library, used it from my C code. It worked well for many PDFs but not for some others [2].

[1] There could be better products by now. Also, had heard good things about PDFTextStream, which another comment here mentions.

[2] Some data would get corrupted, e.g. characters interchanged, missing characters, etc, in the extracted text.

There are technical reasons inherent in the nature of the PDF format, due to which 100% perfect text extraction, including correct character positions, is not always possible for all PDF files (only for some) - that's one thing I learned from working on that project. Some of that learning was from a key person at the company that sells and supports xpdf. His support and knowledge was very good. They even quickly fixed a bug or two that I found in the product.

But things do work for many cases. As an aside, I also developed a small program that used heuristics to identify cases in which the PDF extraction was incorrect. Was fun.

hn12
I endorse everything Vasudev has written here. In the abstract a couple of other libraries of interest are Java-coded PDFBox and Python-based PDFMiner.
hn12
No.

Well, the correct answer to almost any such technical question is "yes and no". This one comes as close as any to a bare "no".

It's a good question. PDF->SVG conversions are quite powerful--when they work. They simply do NOT work, in the general case. I deal with a hundred-thousand PDFs at a time, and they demonstrably don't behave with enough regularity to allow for the kind of general transformation I suspect you have in mind.

As it happens, our little company does quite a bit of business extracting content from specific classes of PDFs http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.text.pdf/PDF_content_extracti... Coincidentally, I also research and deliver advanced SVG effects http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.text.xml/SVG_examples.html I certainly am sympathetic to your aim. To be successful, you need to specify your situation more precisely.