PDFBox Problem

[aliki_arg]

Hi!

I'm using PDFBox in order to convert pdf files to txt. It's working, but my task requires keeping some format information such as bold, italics or character size (this information can be kept as a special character in front of these words). Do you have any idea how to do this??

Thank you!!

[SourCookie]

Are you trying to modify a PDF or are you just losing font information on extracted text? Is the font information embedded? Do you have any samples of your text extraction code or a PDF you're extracting?

[JosAH]

I'm using PDFBox in order to convert pdf files to txt. It's working, but my task requires keeping some format information such as bold, italics or character size (this information can be kept as a special character in front of these words). Do you have any idea how to do this??

I wonder what the values of those "special characters" would be if you want to handle Unicode characters gracefully; also, putting those "special values" in front of "words" forces you to recognize "words" in abitrary text. Why not use HTML for this purpose?

kind regards,

Jos

[aliki_arg]

Are you trying to modify a PDF or are you just losing font information on extracted text? Is the font information embedded? Do you have any samples of your text extraction code or a PDF you're extracting?

I'm trying to create a .txt file containing the text and the font information of a pdf file. So I'm trying to find out a way to understand for example which words were bold in the pdf file, when i'm reading the txt file. The initial problem is how to use the PDFbox in order to get font information about the words of a pdf file.

The code i use for the pdf to txt transformation is:

public class PDFTextParser {

PDFParser parser;
String parsedText;
PDFTextStripper pdfStripper;
PDDocument pdDoc;
COSDocument cosDoc;
PDDocumentInformation pdDocInfo;

// PDFTextParser Constructor
public PDFTextParser() {
}

// Extract text from PDF Document
String pdftoText(String fileName) {

System.out.println("Parsing text from PDF file " + fileName + "....");
File f = new File(fileName);

if (!f.isFile()) {
System.out.println("File " + fileName + " does not exist.");
return null;
}

try {
parser = new PDFParser(new FileInputStream(f));
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Unable to open PDF Parser.");
return null;
}

try {
parser.parse();
cosDoc = parser.getDocument();
pdfStripper = new PDFTextStripper();
pdDoc = new PDDocument(cosDoc);
parsedText = pdfStripper.getText(pdDoc);
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("An exception occured in parsing the PDF Document.");
e.printStackTrace();
try {
if (cosDoc != null) cosDoc.close();
if (pdDoc != null) pdDoc.close();
} catch (Exception e1) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}
System.out.println("Done.");
return parsedText;
}

// Write the parsed text from PDF to a file
void writeTexttoFile(String pdfText, String fileName) {

System.out.println("\nWriting PDF text to output text file " + fileName + "....");
try {
PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(fileName);
pw.print(pdfText);
pw.close();
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("An exception occured in writing the pdf text to file.");
e.printStackTrace();
}
System.out.println("Done.");
}

//Extracts text from a PDF Document and writes it to a text file
public static void main(String args[]) {

if (args.length != 2) {
System.out.println("Usage: java PDFTextParser <InputPDFFilename> <OutputTextFile>");
System.exit(1);
}

PDFTextParser pdfTextParserObj = new PDFTextParser();
String pdfToText = pdfTextParserObj.pdftoText(args[0]);

if (pdfToText == null) {
System.out.println("PDF to Text Conversion failed.");
}
else {
System.out.println("\nThe text parsed from the PDF Document....\n" + pdfToText);
pdfTextParserObj.writeTexttoFile(pdfToText, args[1]);
}
}
}