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

Data extraction from a table in a PDF file

Data extraction from a form in a PDF file

How to install

Install apache pdfbox manually (to get the v2.0.6 click here ) and its two dependencies commons-logging.jar and fontbox

warning: only pdfbox versions from version 2.0.0 upwards are compatible with this version of PDFLayoutTextStripper.java

How to use on Linux/Mac

cd PDFLayoutTextStripper
javac -cp .:/pathto/pdfbox-2.0.6.jar:/pathto/commons-logging-1.2.jar:/pathto/PDFLayoutTextStripper/fontbox-2.0.6.jar *.java
java -cp .:/pathto/pdfbox-2.0.6.jar:/pathto/commons-logging-1.2.jar:/pathto/PDFLayoutTextStripper/fontbox-2.0.6.jar test

How to use on Windows

The same as for Linux (see above) but replace : with ;

Sample code

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.IOException;
import org.apache.pdfbox.io.RandomAccessFile;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdfparser.PDFParser;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.text.PDFTextStripper;

public class test {
	public static void main(String[] args) {
		String string = null;
        try {
            PDFParser pdfParser = new PDFParser(new RandomAccessFile(new File("./samples/bus.pdf"), "r"));
            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);
	}
}

Contributors

Thanks to

Dmytro Zelinskyy for reporting an issue with its correction (v2.2.3)
Ho Ting Cheng for reporting an issue (v2.1)
James Sullivan for having updated the code to make it work with the latest version of PDFBox (v2.0)

774961477/PDFLayoutTextStripper