Perhaps you could convert your PDF files to SVG using inkscape, and then parse the resultant SVG using one of the standard XML processing libraries.

Inkscape has a command line mode that can do almost anything that you can do with the GUI.

inkscape -f Input_file.pdf -l Output_file.svg

In reply to Re: How to extract image captions from a PDF file using perl by chrestomanci
in thread How to extract image captions from a PDF file using perl by Anonymous Monk

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