PDF files are not directly supported by Java. This tutorial shows you how to extract text from a PDF file in simple steps using JPedal PDF library.
Why use a third party library to handle PDF files?
PDF files are a very complex binary/text hybrid data structure. The data needs to be parsed and assembled from many sources to create the text in a PDF file. In this example, we will use our JPedal PDF library to make this task simple.
Extract Unstructured Text from a PDF file
If a PDF contains unstructured, extractable text, this API will allow it to be extracted from the page (Javadoc).
ExtractTextInRectangle extract=new ExtractTextInRectangle("C:/pdfs/mypdf.pdf");
//extract.setPassword("password");
if (extract.openPDFFile()) {
int pageCount=extract.getPageCount();
for (int page=1; page<=pageCount; page++) {
String text=extract.getTextOnPage(page);
}
}
extract.closePDFfile();
Extract Structured Text from a tagged PDF file
If a PDF document was correctly created with structured, extractable text (click here to find out how to find out), then this API will allow the text content to be extracted from the page as Structured content in a Java Document (Javadoc).
ExtractTextInRectangle extract=new ExtractTextInRectangle("C:/pdfs/mypdf.pdf");
//extract.setPassword("password");
if (extract.openPDFFile()) {
int pageCount=extract.getPageCount();
for (int page=1; page<=pageCount; page++) {
String text=extract.getTextOnPage(page);
}
}
extract.closePDFfile();
Extract Wordlist from a PDF file
Many customers use JPedal to pre-index the text content of their PDF files in a database. This API makes it easy to extract all the words from a PDF file with their text positions onscreen (Javadoc).
ExtractTextAsWordlist extract=new ExtractTextAsWordlist("C:/pdfs/mypdf.pdf");
//extract.setPassword("password");
if (extract.openPDFFile()) {
int pageCount=extract.getPageCount();
for (int page=1; page<=pageCount; page++) {
List wordList=extract.getWordsOnPage(page);
}
}
extract.closePDFfile();Extract Document outline from PDF files
PDF file often contain a Document outline to provide a Table of Contents (Javadoc).
ExtractOutline extract=new ExtractOutline("C:/pdfs/mypdf.pdf");
//extract.setPassword("password");
if (extract.openPDFFile()) {
Document pdfOutline=extract.getPDFTextOutline();
}
extract.closePDFfile();
