PDFMiner2

PDFMiner2 is a maintained fork of PDFMiner using six for Python 2+3 compatibility

PDFMiner is a tool for extracting information from PDF documents. Unlike other PDF-related tools, it focuses entirely on getting and analyzing text data. PDFMiner allows one to obtain the exact location of text in a page, as well as other information such as fonts or lines. It includes a PDF converter that can transform PDF files into other text formats (such as HTML). It has an extensible PDF parser that can be used for other purposes than text analysis.

Webpage: https://euske.github.io/pdfminer/
Download (PyPI): https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pdfminer2/
Demo WebApp: http://pdf2html.tabesugi.net:8080/

Features

Written entirely in Python.
Parse, analyze, and convert PDF documents.
PDF-1.7 specification support. (well, almost)
CJK languages and vertical writing scripts support.
Various font types (Type1, TrueType, Type3, and CID) support.
Basic encryption (RC4) support.
Outline (TOC) extraction.
Tagged contents extraction.
Automatic layout analysis.

How to Install

Install Python 2.7 or newer. (Python 3.4 is supported in pdfminer.six)
Download the source code.
Unpack it.
Run setup.py:

$ python setup.py install
Do the following test:

$ pdf2txt.py samples/simple1.pdf

For CJK Languages

In order to process CJK languages, do the following before running setup.py install:

$ make cmap
python tools/conv_cmap.py pdfminer/cmap Adobe-CNS1 cmaprsrc/cid2code_Adobe_CNS1.txt
reading 'cmaprsrc/cid2code_Adobe_CNS1.txt'...
writing 'CNS1_H.py'...
...
$ python setup.py install

On Windows machines which don't have make command, paste the following commands on a command line prompt:

mkdir pdfminer\cmap
python tools\conv_cmap.py -c B5=cp950 -c UniCNS-UTF8=utf-8 pdfminer\cmap Adobe-CNS1 cmaprsrc\cid2code_Adobe_CNS1.txt
python tools\conv_cmap.py -c GBK-EUC=cp936 -c UniGB-UTF8=utf-8 pdfminer\cmap Adobe-GB1 cmaprsrc\cid2code_Adobe_GB1.txt
python tools\conv_cmap.py -c RKSJ=cp932 -c EUC=euc-jp -c UniJIS-UTF8=utf-8 pdfminer\cmap Adobe-Japan1 cmaprsrc\cid2code_Adobe_Japan1.txt
python tools\conv_cmap.py -c KSC-EUC=euc-kr -c KSC-Johab=johab -c KSCms-UHC=cp949 -c UniKS-UTF8=utf-8 pdfminer\cmap Adobe-Korea1 cmaprsrc\cid2code_Adobe_Korea1.txt
python setup.py install

Command Line Tools

PDFMiner comes with two handy tools: pdf2txt.py and dumppdf.py.

pdf2txt.py

pdf2txt.py extracts text contents from a PDF file. It extracts all the text that are to be rendered programmatically, i.e. text represented as ASCII or Unicode strings. It cannot recognize text drawn as images that would require optical character recognition. It also extracts the corresponding locations, font names, font sizes, writing direction (horizontal or vertical) for each text portion. You need to provide a password for protected PDF documents when its access is restricted. You cannot extract any text from a PDF document which does not have extraction permission.

(For details, refer to the html document.)

dumppdf.py

dumppdf.py dumps the internal contents of a PDF file in pseudo-XML format. This program is primarily for debugging purposes, but it's also possible to extract some meaningful contents (e.g. images).

(For details, refer to the html document.)

API Changes

As of November 2013, there were a few changes made to the PDFMiner API prior to October 2013. This is the result of code restructuring. Here is a list of the changes:

PDFDocument class is moved to pdfdocument.py.
PDFDocument class now takes a PDFParser object as an argument. PDFDocument.set_parser() and PDFParser.set_document() is removed.
PDFPage class is moved to pdfpage.py
process_pdf function is implemented as a class method PDFPage.get_pages.