An highly accurate PDF text analysis library built around Poppler. I built this since IText and other PDF analysis toolkits in python actually are imprecise and tend to use coordinate systems that are not fine grained in their representation of glyph positions.
The primary method of using this is via the pts script, which supplies a wealth of
text positioning information to stdout by default. In the parsing directory there
are a number of Ruby scripts for translating this UNIX-stype output to first-class
objects. There is also the cmap script which can retrieve character map information
from PDFs. At the time of writing, this was the only open source one available, though
who knows what related work has come out since then.
To build it, just compile the poppler version under /lib/poppler and also compile
the top level scripts in this directory (the Makefile should take care of this).
I have the feeling this might have the strongest correctness and precision guarantees of any PDF text analysis library around, since it was used in a very sensitive project...
core: the wrapper for analyzing the PDF structure recorded in the modified poppler
adjustment: a datatype for recording glyph displacements
lib: the modified poppler
parsing: ruby scripts for parsing glyph positioning information and cmap data
utils: contains the actual analysis utilities (for this public version, just the print glyph information script)