Yet another (but similar) way to do it: use pdftohtml's XML output mode, and parse that. This has the advantage that it stores position information for the text, and it writes the strings out in the order they were rendered on the page. This can be quite helpful.

pdftohtml uses the internals of xpdf to do the work. xpdf comes with the pdftotext tool, which might do all you need.

If none of the above works -- and some PDFs do very weird things with font encoding -- if you install the DjVuLibre application, and run your PDF through the Any2DjVu converter, it will do real OCR, the text of which you can extract with the djvused tool.

All this is moot, of course, if the terms of use of the original file forbid anything other than reading the document on the screen. Many financial institutions use PDF for its "read only" (for the casual user) nature.

--
bowling trophy thieves, die!

In reply to Re: Re: Reading PDF files by Willard B. Trophy
in thread Reading PDF files by Helter

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.