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

``bash
npm install --save 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

extract(filePath, [options], [pdftotextcommand], callback)

Options and pdftotextcommand are not required.


`javascript
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.

`javascript
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.

`javascript
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)
})
`

You can also override the command for pdftotext if it is installed in a location that is not available in the PATH environment variable


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

As a command line tool

`bash
npm install -g pdf-text-extract
`

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

`bash
pdf-text-extract ./test/data/multipage.pdf


outputs

['', '']

`

Test

``bash

install dev dependencies

npm install

run tests

npm test