pdfparser: A Python repository from shudima

pdfparser

Python binding for libpoppler - focused on text extraction from PDF documents.

Intended as an easy to use replacement for pdfminer, which provides much better performance (see below for short comparison) and is Python3 compatible.

See this article for some comparisons with pdfminer and other approaches.

Binding is written in cython.

Requires recent libpoppler >= 0.40 - so I'd recommend to build it from source to get latest library, but it works also with recent libpoppler library present in common linux distributions (then it requires dev package to build). See below for installation instructions.

Available under GPL v3 or any later version license (libpoppler is also GPL).

How to install

Below or some instructions to install this package

CentOS 7 - system-wide libpoppler (pkg-config method)

Install the poppler-devel package (Tested with version 0.26.5-16.el7)

yum install poppler-devel poppler-cpp-devel

Install cython

pip install cython

Install the repo

pip install git+https://github.com/izderadicka/pdfparser

CentOS 7 - self compiled method

Clone this repo and enter into the root folder

cd /git/repos/
git clone https://github.com/izderadicka/pdfparser.git
cd pdfparser

Clone the poppler repo and install (similar to build_poppler.sh)

yum install openjpeg2-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel cmake
git clone --depth 1 https://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/poppler/poppler.git poppler_src
cd poppler_src
cmake -DENABLE_SPLASH=OFF -DENABLE_UTILS=OFF -DENABLE_LIBOPENJPEG=none .
make
cp libpoppler.so.?? ../pdfparser/
cp cpp/libpoppler-cpp.so.? ../pdfparser
cd ..
POPPLER_ROOT=poppler_src python setup.py install

Debian like - self compiled method (with local poppler library)

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/izderadicka/pdfparser.git
cd pdfparser
./build_poppler.sh
pip install cython
POPPLER_ROOT=poppler_src ./setup.py install
#test that it works
python tests/dump_file.py test_docs/test1.pdf

Debian like - system wide libpoppler

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y libpoppler-private-dev libpoppler-cpp-dev
pip install cython
pip install git+https://github.com/izderadicka/pdfparser

Mac OS

pip install cython
pip install git+https://github.com/izderadicka/pdfparser

Usage

See tests/dump_file.py for available arguments and some basic example.

usage: dump_file.py [-h] [--char-details] [-f FIRST_PAGE] [-l LAST_PAGE]
                    [--phys-layout] [--fixed-pitch FIXED_PITCH] [-q]
                    document

positional arguments:
  document              Document file

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --char-details        print character details
  -f FIRST_PAGE, --first-page FIRST_PAGE
                        first page
  -l LAST_PAGE, --last-page LAST_PAGE
                        first page
  --phys-layout         Physical Layout - param for text analysis
  --fixed-pitch FIXED_PITCH
                        Fixed pitch - param for text analysis - app. max space size
  -q, --quiet           Silence all output from poppler

Speed comparisons

	pdfreader	pdfminer	speed-up factor
tiny document (half page)	0.033s	0.121s	3.6 x
small document (5 pages)	0.141s	0.810s	5.7 x
medium document (55 pages)	1.166s	10.524s	9.0 x
large document (436 pages)	10.581s	108.095s	10.2 x

pdfparser code used in test

import pdfparser.poppler as pdf
import sys

d=pdf.Document(sys.argv[1])

print('No of pages', d.no_of_pages)
for p in d:
    print('Page', p.page_no, 'size =', p.size)
    for f in p:
        print(' '*1,'Flow')
        for b in f:
            print(' '*2,'Block', 'bbox=', b.bbox.as_tuple())
            for l in b:
                print(' '*3, l.text.encode('UTF-8'), '(%0.2f, %0.2f, %0.2f, %0.2f)'% l.bbox.as_tuple())
                #assert l.char_fonts.comp_ratio < 1.0
                for i in range(len(l.text)):
                    print(l.text[i].encode('UTF-8'), '(%0.2f, %0.2f, %0.2f, %0.2f)'% l.char_bboxes[i].as_tuple(),\
                        l.char_fonts[i].name, l.char_fonts[i].size, l.char_fonts[i].color,)
                print()

shudima/pdfparser