PDF-UTIL

pdf-util is a tool to extract text from pdf. for the moment not support ocr scannig to extract text only works for searchable pdf files. This package doesn't have nodejs dependencies.

Installation

======= To install the module. npm install pdf-util

You need install the next tools to use this module

• pdftotext
  • pdftotext is used to extract text out of searchable pdf documents
• pdfinfo
  • pdfinfo is used to obtain the info of pdf documents

OSX

To begin on OSX, first make sure you have the homebrew package manager installed.

pdftotext is included as part on the xpdf utilities library. xpdf can be installed via homebrew

brew install xpdf

Ubuntu

pdftotext is included in the poppler-utils library. To installer poppler-utils execute

apt-get install poppler-utils

Heroku Buildpack

For those who are using heroku VM, you will need to use the buildpack to get the job done. Setups:

1. add buildpack on the config for https://github.com/ONode/heroku-buildpack-xpdf
2. manually adding the .xpdfrc file in the main project folder.
3. edit the languages needed in the file .xpdfrc
4. restart and deploy your dyno

Usage

=====================

PDF Info

Obtain info from pdf file

var pdfUtil = require('pdf-util');
var pdf_path = "absolute_path/to/pdf_file.pdf";
 
pdfUtil.info(pdf_path, function(err, info) {
    if (err) throw(err);
    console.log(info);
});

It's retrieve an object with the data info from the pdf file

{
  "title": "some title",
  "subject": "TeX output 2003.10.17:1908",
  "author": "Fernando Hernandez",
  "creator": "creator name",
  "producer": "Acrobat Distiller 4.0 for Windows",
  "creationdate": 1066428670000,
  "moddate": 1066428687000,
  "tagged": "no",
  "form": "none",
  "pages": 8,
  "encrypted": "no",
  "page_size": "612 x 792 pts (letter)",
  "file_size": "28695 bytes",
  "optimized": "yes",
  "pdf_version": 1.2
}

PDF Text extract

You can extract text by a range of pages given an option object with from and to properties, or simply omit this option to extract all text from the pdf file

var pdfUtil = require('pdf-util');
var pdf_path = "absolute_path/to/pdf_file.pdf";
 
//option to extract text from page 0 to 10
 
var option = {
    exeOrder_1 : function(tools, dateline){  return ... your code here },
    exeOrder_2 : function(tools, dateline){  return ... your code here },
    exeOrder_3 : function(tools, dateline){  return ... your code here },
 
    from: 0,
    to: 10,
 
 
    new_paragraph: false,
    remove_space_asian_character: false,
    remove_single_n_english: false
 
};
 
 
pdfUtil.pdfToText(upload.path, option, function(err, data) {
  if (err) throw(err);
  console.log(data); //print text    
});
 
//Omit option to extract all text from the pdf file
pdfUtil.pdfToText(upload.path, function(err, data) {
  if (err) throw(err);
  console.log(data); //print all text    
});

tools are the object to store all the regular expression to filter out the lines.

Custome processing work

There will be some extra works involving from decoding the line from the PDF pages. There we have the custom job available for decoding.

option.customwork is the function for user to make their regex on operations

Tests

======= To test that your system satisfies the needed dependencies and that module is functioning correctly execute the command in the pdf-util module folder

cd <project_root>/node_modules/pdf-util
npm test