Do you have a (small) anonymized PDF sample we can look at? Is the PDF text even searchable and selectable in a PDF viewer?
At $WORK I use pdftohtml with the following command line: pdftohtml.exe -xml -stdout -zoom 1.4 [PDF FILE]
This will rip out all the text elements into an XML file with attributes for the font, x/y position on the page and text length.
(-zoom 1.4 makes the positioning units 100 dpi, -stdout streams the output to STDOUT instead of writing it to a file).
Here is an example of what I typically work with:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE pdf2xml SYSTEM "pdf2xml.dtd">
<pdf2xml>
<page number="1" position="absolute" top="0" left="0" height="1100" wi
+dth="850">
<fontspec id="0" size="17" family="Times" color="#000000"/>
<text top="103" left="115" width="602" height="18" font="0">XXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</text>
<text top="120" left="115" width="602" height="18" font="0">XXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</text>
<text top="186" left="115" width="103" height="18" font="0">ROUTE TO:
+</text>
<text top="186" left="265" width="107" height="17" font="0">Audit Bil
+ling</text>
<text top="220" left="115" width="128" height="18" font="0">SORT GROU
+P:</text>
<text top="220" left="265" width="152" height="18" font="0">Invoice S
+ort Group</text>
<text top="286" left="115" width="260" height="18" font="0">OH_GOD_IT
+_BURNS 2013-12-20</text>
<text top="286" left="415" width="71" height="18" font="0">23:53:04</
+text>
<text top="286" left="545" width="108" height="18" font="0">FOOBAR</t
+ext>
<text top="320" left="115" width="602" height="18" font="0">XXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</text>
<text top="336" left="115" width="602" height="18" font="0">XXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</text>
</page>
/<pdf2html>
I can then use XML::Twig with XPath expressions to pull the exact xml nodes I want:
open (my $XML, "-|", "pdftohtml.exe -xml -zoom 1.4 -stdout $PDF_FILE")
+ or die "$!\n$^E";
# We are only interested in the text for the "ROUTE TO:" and "SORT
+ GROUP:" sections
# Set the twig_handlers to extract the <text> nodes of interest; a
+ll other nodes will be ignored
# XPath queries provide an extra 1/20 inch padding on all sides to
+ take font and rendering variations into account
my $t = XML::Twig->new(
twig_handlers => {
'//text[(@top >= 180 and @top <= 190) and (@left >= 100 an
+d @left <= 111)]' => \&RouteTo,
'//text[(@top >= 215 and @top <= 225) and (@left >= 260 an
+d @left <= 270)]' => \&InvoiceSort,
},
comments => 'drop', # remove any comments
empty_tags => 'normal',# empty tags = <tag/>
);
$t->parse($XML);
$t->purge;
close $XML;