Extracting individual page text from PDFs?

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Misty
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Extracting individual page text from PDFs?

Post by Misty »

Does anyone know any software that can automatically output the text from a PDF into individual files for each page? I'm preparing a book to be uploaded to my library's webpage, which is going up in a couple of formats - one of them is a per-page JPEG version, created from the original PDF that went to the publisher. To make the per-page view searchable I need text files for each individual page. Since it's the original PDF it contains all selectable text, but I can't seen to figure out how to extract the text how I need it. Acrobat will output text, but only for the entire book - not for each page separately. Copy/pasting manually would be a total pain I'm hoping to avoid.
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StevePoling
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Re: Extracting individual page text from PDFs?

Post by StevePoling »

Misty wrote:Does anyone know any software that can automatically output the text from a PDF into individual files for each page?
Depends on whether you can program or not. There's an open source project called pdfbox that's part of the Apache project. It has functionality to snarf the text from a PDF on a page-by-page basis. Trouble is that it's a little balky about handing you text. You get one or more characters and its x,y position, but you don't get a nice string of a sentence like you'd like. I think that if you're a strong Java programmer you could knock out a solution using pdfbox in a week or so.

Depending on what you've got to start with, you might want to rethink your workflow and make PDF an output instead of an input to your process.
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Re: Extracting individual page text from PDFs?

Post by daniel_reetz »

pdftk might be able to do this--id provide a link but i am typing from a phone. definitely seems doable.
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Re: Extracting individual page text from PDFs?

Post by toka »

In ubuntu / debian there is a tool called pdfimages, which is part of the poppler pdf tools: http://poppler.freedesktop.org/

It can be installed by

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install poppler-utils
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daniel_reetz
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Re: Extracting individual page text from PDFs?

Post by daniel_reetz »

maybe acrobat or pdftk could split the book into individual page pdfs and then you could batch convert to text using acrobat...
Afish
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Re: Extracting individual page text from PDFs?

Post by Afish »

Acrobat Professional can do this.

Document> Extract pages> input from page to page and select Extract Pages as separate Files.
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Misty
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Re: Extracting individual page text from PDFs?

Post by Misty »

Thanks, Afish - that's exactly what I needed! After splitting the pages, I was able to do a batch text extraction.

Steve: We already have a number of books up that aren't as suited to PDF downloading, and I want to have this book be consistent in presentation even if PDF downloading is an option. I prefer to have at least one view for each item that doesn't require third-party software, too - JPEG pages can be viewed by people who don't have or don't want a PDF reader, and the collections software we're using lets us make those JPEG pages searchable per-page if I provide plaintext files to associate with each of those pages.
The opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily represent those of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
ovencakerugby
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Re: Extracting individual page text from PDFs?

Post by ovencakerugby »

Why not give Deskunpdf a go.
I have converted excel pdfs and word ones back to their respective starting points
regards
ovencakerugby
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