phbrgnomo/pdf-readers

Experimentation with Python PDF files manipulation

Playing around with Python PDF handlers to see what is their outputs and their performance.

For detail about what each package can do, check the features folder.

Packages tested:

1. PyPDF2:

• A pure Python library for reading and extracting text from PDF files.
• PyPDF2 GitHub: https://github.com/mstamy2/PyPDF2

import PyPDF2

 with open("example.pdf", "rb") as file:
     pdf_reader = PyPDF2.PdfReader(file)
     text = ""
     for page_num in range(pdf_reader.numPages):
         text += pdf_reader.getPage(page_num).extractText()

2. PyMuPDF (MuPDF):

• A lightweight PDF and XPS viewer with support for text extraction.
• PyMuPDF GitHub: https://github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF

import fitz

 pdf_document = fitz.open("example.pdf")
 text = ""
 for page_num in range(pdf_document.page_count):
     page = pdf_document[page_num]
     text += page.get_text()   

3. Tabula-py:

• A Python wrapper for Tabula, a Java library for extracting tables from PDFs.
• Tabula-py GitHub: https://github.com/chezou/tabula-py

```python
import tabula

tables = tabula.read_pdf("example.pdf", pages="all")

```

4. Camelot-py:

• A Python library for extracting tables from PDFs into pandas DataFrames.
• Camelot-py GitHub: https://github.com/camelot-dev/camelot

 import camelot

 tables = camelot.read_pdf("example.pdf", flavor="stream", pages="all")

5. pdfminer.six:

• A PDF parser and text extraction tool.
• pdfminer.six GitHub: https://github.com/pdfminersix/pdfminer.six

```python
from pdfminer.high_level import extract_text

text = extract_text(open("example.pdf", "rb"))

```

6. PDFplumber:

• A wrapper for the PDFMiner library, providing a high-level interface for text extraction and table parsing.
• PDFplumber GitHub: https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber

 import pdfplumber

 with pdfplumber.open("example.pdf") as pdf:
     text = ""
     for page in pdf.pages:
         text += page.extract_text()

7. Slate:

• A Python package for extracting text and tables from PDFs.
• Slate GitHub: https://github.com/timClicks/slate

 from slate import PDF

 with open("example.pdf", "rb") as file:
     pdf = PDF(file)
     text = pdf.text()

8. Slate (slate3k):

• An alternative version of Slate, a Python package for extracting text and tables from PDFs.
• Slate (slate3k) GitHub: https://github.com/TAMU-CPT/slate

```python
from slate3k import PDF

def extract_text_from_pdf(file_path):
    with open(file_path, "rb") as file:
        pdf = PDF(file)
        text = ""
        for page in pdf:
            text += page.get_text()
    return text

```

9. PDFQuery:

• A PDF scraping library that extends PyPDF2 and lxml.
• PDFQuery GitHub: https://github.com/jcushman/pdfquery

 from pdfquery import PDFQuery

 def extract_text_from_pdfquery(file_path):
     pdf = PDFQuery(file_path)
     pdf.load()
     
     # Example: Extracting text from the first page
     text = pdf.extract([
         ('with_formatter', 'text'),
         ('text', 'LTPage[pageid="1"]'),
     ])
     
     return text

10. PyPDFium:

• A Python library for extracting text, images, and metadata from PDF files.
• PyPDFium GitHub: https://github.com/rouge8/pypdfium

 from pypdfium import PdfDocument

 def extract_text_with_pypdfium(file_path):
     with open(file_path, 'rb') as file:
         pdf_doc = PdfDocument(file)
         text = ''
         for page_num in range(pdf_doc.get_page_count()):
             page = pdf_doc.get_page(page_num)
             text += page.get_text()
     return text