sohaibanwaar / pdf-to-text

PDFParser

User Manual Search

This Python script is used to parse a PDF user manual, extract text from it (even if it's a scanned document), and remove headers and footers. It uses the Tesseract OCR engine for text extraction and PyPDF2 for PDF handling.

Prerequisites

Before running this script, you need to install some dependencies:

1. Python 3.10 or higher

   brew install python
   

2. Install any virtual environment manager (e.g. virtualenv, conda, etc.)
   1. I am using conda
   2. Install conda from https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html
   3. Create a virtual environment

      conda create --name pdf_parser python=3.8
      

   4. Activate the virtual environment

      conda activate pdf_parser
      

   5. Install the required packages

      pip install -r requirements.txt
      

3. Install the required packages
4. For Mac Users
   1. Install Tesseract

      brew install tesseract
      

   2. Install Poppler

      brew install poppler
      

5. For Linux (Ubuntu-18.04) Users
   1. Install tesseract

      sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
      

   2. Install poppler

      sudo apt-get install poppler-utils
      

6. Download the trained data file for Simplified Chinese

   sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/tessdata/
   sudo curl -L -o /usr/local/share/tessdata/chi_sim.traineddata https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata/raw/main/chi_sim.traineddata
   

7. Download the text detector model

   sudo wget --load-cookies /tmp/cookies.txt "https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&confirm=$(wget --quiet --save-cookies /tmp/cookies.txt --keep-session-cookies --no-check-certificate 'https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1Jk4eGD7crsqCCg9C9VjCLkMN3ze8kutZ' -O- | sed -rn 's/.*confirm=([0-9A-Za-z_]+).*/1n/p')&id=1Jk4eGD7crsqCCg9C9VjCLkMN3ze8kutZ" -O craft_mlt_25k.pth && rm -rf /tmp/cookies.txt
   

8. Run the script

   python main.py