Extracts text from pdfs in a similar way to PymuPDF, but without the AGPL license. Built on pypdfium2.

You'll need python 3.9+.

Install with:

pip install pdftext

• Inspect the settings in pdftext/settings.py. You can override any settings with environment variables.

This command will write out a text file with the extracted plain text.

pdftext PDF_PATH --out_path output.txt

• PDF_PATH must be a single pdf file.
• --out_path path to the output txt file. If not specified, will write to stdout.
• --sort will attempt to sort in reading order if specified.

pdftext PDF_PATH --out_path output.txt --output_type json

• PDF_PATH must be a single pdf file.
• --out_path path to the output txt file. If not specified, will write to stdout.
• --output_type specifies whether to write out plain text (default) or json
• --sort will attempt to sort in reading order if specified.

The output will be a json list, with each item in the list corresponding to a single page in the input pdf (in order). Each page will include the following keys:

• bbox - the page bbox, in [x1, y1, x2, y2] format

• rotation - how much the page is rotated, in degrees (0, 90, 180, or 270)

• page_idx - the index of the page

• blocks - the blocks that make up the text in the pdf. Approximately equal to a paragraph.

  • bbox - the block bbox, in [x1, y1, x2, y2] format
  • lines - the lines inside the block
    • bbox - the line bbox, in [x1, y1, x2, y2] format
    • chars - the individual characters in the line
      • char - the actual character, encoded in utf-8
      • rotation - how much the character is rotated, in degrees
      • bbox - the character bbox, in [x1, y1, x2, y2] format
      • origin - the original pdf coordinate origin
      • char_idx - the index of the character on the page (from 0 to number of characters, in original pdf order)
      • font this is font info straight from the pdf, see this pdfium code
        • size - the size of the font used for the character
        • weight - font weight
        • name - font name, may be None
        • flags - font flags, in the format of the PDF spec 1.7 Section 5.7.1 Font Descriptor Flags