i use perl but when trying to do something similar, i found using python3 + pdfquery seemed to work easier & did the column parsing...

http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2015/01/22/pythonpdfquery-scraping-the-fifa-world-player-of-the-year-votes-pdf-into-shape/

i guess the nutshell is loop over each page in pdf, search for matching string, if found, get its x,y coordinates, use that result in_bbox(x,y,x2,y2) to scrape whatever else text might be inside this bounding box - because i wanted a "row" my bbox was x,y,x+500,y+10 ( grid origin at bottom left?)

i don't know how it really works, but i was able to copy/paste enough bits to get what i needed

maybe pdf::api or something can have similar feature in_bbox? is it maybe like a collision detection logic where given bounding box, find all text thingys that collide with it and return an array of those? i'm guessing out my a##

sorry if this doesn't help

In reply to Re^3: How to Extract PDF tables using Perl by Anonymous Monk
in thread How to Extract PDF tables using Perl by perlPsycho

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