fengweijp / pdflayouttextstripper

Converts a pdf file into a text file while keeping the layout of the original pdf. Useful to extract the content from a table in a pdf file for instance. This is a subclass of PDFTextStripper class (from the Apache PDFBox library).

#PDFLayoutTextStripper

Converts a PDF file into a text file while keeping the layout of the original PDF. Useful to extract the content from a table or a form in a PDF file. PDFLayoutTextStripper is a subclass of PDFTextStripper class (from the Apache PDFBox library).

• Use cases
• How to install
• How to use

Use cases

Data extraction from a table in a PDF file

Data extraction from a form in a PDF file

How to install

1. Install apache pdfbox through Maven (to get the v1.8.13 click here )

warning: currently only pdfbox versions strictly inferior to version 2.0.0 are compatible with PDFLayoutTextStripper.java

2. Copy PDFLayoutTextStripper.java inside your main java package

How to use

package pdftest.pt;

import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.IOException;

import org.apache.pdfbox.pdfparser.PDFParser;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper;

public class test {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		String string = null;
        try {
            PDFParser pdfParser = new PDFParser(new FileInputStream("sample.pdf"));
            pdfParser.parse();
            PDDocument pdDocument = new PDDocument(pdfParser.getDocument());
            PDFTextStripper pdfTextStripper = new PDFLayoutTextStripper();
            string = pdfTextStripper.getText(pdDocument);
        } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        };
        System.out.println(string);
	}

}