Investigate PDF reading tools/libraries for java

[jr-991]

/ ---------------------------------------------- pdfbox class to read pdf files ---------------------------------------------------------------- / import org.apache.pdfbox.Loader; import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument; import org.apache.pdfbox.text.PDFTextStripper;

import java.io.File; import java.io.IOException;

public class pdfReader { public static void main(String args[]) throws IOException{ // Loads a document from the chosen directory File file = new File("C:/Users/Juan/IdeaProjects/untitled1/pdf/testPDF.pdf"); PDDocument document = Loader.loadPDF(file);

    // Instantiate a PDFTextStripper class to access the methods required to rip text from a pdf file
    PDFTextStripper pdfStripper = new PDFTextStripper();

    // Retrieve text from the loaded document into a string variable "text" and print it to the console
    String text = pdfStripper.getText(document);
    System.out.println(text);

    // Close the document
    document.close();

    //Experimental: split the text variable into different sections, example below is trying to split by paragraphs
    String[] sections = text.split("\n\\s*\n");
    System.out.print(sections.length);

}

}

[jr-991]

PDFBox supports reading, extracting and turning pdf files into jpeg files.

• Simpler to use with PDF files
  • Provides more functionality to interact with and manipulate PDF files
  • Essentially limited to PDF files

Tesseract can read text from images and scanned documents

• Specialises more in dealing with images or scanned documents
• Provides functionality to extract information from images
• Limited to images/scanned documents

Although both libraries were designed to work with different file types, they can be integrated into one another to diversify the functionality of the program as needed.