poppler-native

Poppler for Node

Allows you to use the native Poppler C++ backend to efficiently parse PDF files from NodeJS. Outputs similar information to pdftohtml -xml -stdout test.pdf (with pdftohtml from the poppler-utils package), because it uses parts of the same codebase which have been rewritten to output N-API objects instead of XML code. All contained functions return JavaScript promises.

Getting started

• dependencies: build-essential; curl, PNG, JPEG and FreeType development headers; ghostscript, python, mupdf-tools, qpdf
• npm install poppler-native (only tested on Ubuntu 16.04 and 20.04 so far)

// allows filename...
const pdf = require('poppler-native');
pdf.info('test.pdf').then(res => console.log(res));

// ...or buffer with raw PDF bytes directly
const fs = require('fs-extra');
fs.readFile('test.pdf')
  .then(f => pdf.info(f))
  .then(res => console.log(res));

// you also have the option to convert the PDF to a PS and then reconvert it to PDF again via GhostScript before extracting data from it, which can sometimes help when wrong characters are extracted with the default method:
pdf.info('test.pdf', { reconvertThroughPS: true });

In order to visualize the parsed text boxes and images, you can also write the entire output from the pdf.info function into a JSON file, then open the file misc/pdf-json-viewer.html in any web browser and drag-and-drop the JSON file there.

Contributing

Updating Poppler

This is obviously only necessary when a new version of Poppler is released. According to their readme, the internal Poppler C++ API, which is the foundation of this project, might be subject to breaking changes, even in minor releases. Consequently, evaluate new Poppler versions thoroughly before updating.

• Download the Poppler sources from here.
• Put all *.h, *.c and *.cc files from poppler-20.11.0/goo into native/poppler/goo. The same for fofi and poppler. Do not change the existing two config files.
• Remove the following files from the native/poppler/poppler directory: CairoFontEngine.cc CairoFontEngine.h CairoOutputDev.cc CairoOutputDev.h CairoRescaleBox.cc CairoRescaleBox.h GlobalParamsWin.cc JPEG2000Stream.cc JPEG2000Stream.h SignatureHandler.cc SignatureHandler.h SplashOutputDev.cc SplashOutputDev.h
• Remove the line #include "splash/SplashTypes.h" from native/poppler/poppler/GfxState.cc.

License

GPLv2 or later, because the Poppler source is bundled.