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lebedov / python-pdfbox

Python interface to Apache PDFBox command-line tools.
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Extracting order pre-definable? #18

Open luke4u opened 4 years ago

luke4u commented 4 years ago

Hi Guys,

Just wondering for a pdf file, if the text extraction order can be defined? As pointed out here, is there similar setting to adjust the extracting order?

This images shows the error.

parsing order issue

AUB_Financials_Dec_2018_pg9.pdf

Much appreciated any insights.

Thanks. Luke

lebedov commented 4 years ago

Does the sort option of the extract_text method do what you need? If not, you will have to look into wrapping pdfbox's dev API (by design, python-pdfbox only exposes pdfbox's command line interface); I have posted a gist that demonstrates how to access the API from Python that you can use as a starting point for wrapping the PDFTextStripper Java class so that you can run the setSortByPosition() method.

lebedov commented 3 years ago

@zevio, if you delete the pdfbox-app*jar file cached by python-pdfbox (in ~/.cache/python-pdfbox on Linux or ~/Library/Caches/python-pdfbox on MacOS), the latest jar file will be downloaded the next time you import the package.

zevio commented 3 years ago

I was about to correct my suggestion. Actually I think the issue is not directly linked to the jar file version but to the -sort option as you previously said. The same issue currently happens with Apache Tika, that bundles PDFBox. But calling setSortByPosition() does not seem to work at my end neither changing the configuration file in Apache Tika. Still, using the -sort option with the jar file corrects most of my issues. However and surprisingly, I obtained much better results with OCR (Pytesseract) for PDF content extraction.