PDF-TO-TEXT

pdf-to-text 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-to-text

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

Usage

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PDF Info

Obtain info from pdf file

var pdfUtil = require('pdf-to-text');
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-to-text');
var pdf_path = "absolute_path/to/pdf_file.pdf";

//option to extract text from page 0 to 10
var option = {from: 0, to: 10};

pdfUtil.pdfToText(pdf_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(pdf_path, function(err, data) {
  if (err) throw(err);
  console.log(data); //print all text    
});

Tests

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

cd <project_root>/node_modules/pdf-to-text
npm test