pdf-text-extract

PDF Text Extract

Extract text from pdfs that contain searchable pdf text. The module is wrapper that calls the pdftotext command to perform the actual extraction

Installation

npm install pdf-text-extract

You will need the pdftotext binary available on your path. There are packages available for many different operating systems

See https://github.com/nisaacson/pdf-extract#osx for how to install the pdftotext command

Usage

As a module

var path = require('path')
var filePath = path.join(__dirname, 'test/data/multipage.pdf')
var extract = require('pdf-text-extract')
extract(filePath, function (err, pages) {
  if (err) {
    console.dir(err)
    return
  }
  console.dir(pages)
})

The output will be an array of where each entry is a page of text. If you want just a string of all pages you can set the option to splitPages: false.

var filePath = path.join(__dirname, 'test/data/multipage.pdf')
var extract = require('pdf-text-extract')
extract(filePath, { splitPages: false }, function (err, text) {
  if (err) {
    console.dir(err)
    return
  }
  console.dir(text)
})

You can set the following options:

• firstPage: First page to extract
• lastPage: Last page to extract
• resolution: in dpi, as is specified by pdftotext -r
• crop: Should be an object { x:x, y:y, w:w, h:h }
• layout: Should be either layout, raw or htmlmeta. Default: layout
• encoding: Should be either UCS-2, ASCII7, Latin1, UTF-8, ZapfDingbats or Symbol. Default: UTF-8
• eol: End of line convention. One of either: unix, dos or mac
• ownerPassword: Owner password (for encrypted files)
• userPassword: User password (for encrypted files)
• splitPages: If true, the result will be and array of pages. Default: true.

If needed you can pass an optional arguments to the extract function. These will be passed to the child_process.spawn call.

var filePath = path.join(__dirname, 'test/data/multipage.pdf')
var extract = require('pdf-text-extract')
var options = {
  cwd: "./"
}
extract(filePath, options, function (err, pages) {
  if (err) {
    console.dir(err)
    return
  }
  console.dir('extracted pages', pages)
})

As a command line tool

npm install -g pdf-text-extract

Execute with the filePath as an argument. Output will be json-formatted array of pages

pdf-text-extract ./test/data/multipage.pdf
# outputs
# ['<page 1 content...>', '<page 2 content...>']

Test

# install dev dependencies
npm install
# run tests
npm test