The best library for reading PDF

Mechanizator has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: The best library for reading PDF by marto (Cardinal) on Mar 15, 2010 at 13:22 UTC
Depends what you mean by "text", some PDFs are made up of scanned images and need to be OCR'd. Re: parse content of PDF file may be of interest, however you should also read Extracting text from PDF. No really.	[reply]
A reply falls below the community's threshold of quality. You may see it by logging in.
Re: The best library for reading PDF by fod (Friar) on Mar 15, 2010 at 15:55 UTC
I've had good results using CAM::PDF. I found it extremely easy to use - the documentation is excellent and the length of time between module installation and getting actual results was minimal.	[reply]
A reply falls below the community's threshold of quality. You may see it by logging in.
Re: The best library for reading PDF by JavaFan (Canon) on Mar 15, 2010 at 13:06 UTC
Best according to which metric? Fastest? Most memory friendly? The one with the least crashes? The nicest API? If the latter, according to my tastes, yours or someone elses? The one that install the fastest? The one with the best documentation? The one that comes with free fries? Something else? Unless you can give any indication what "best" means to you, any of the answers that actually mentions a distribution is going to be utterly useless to you.	[reply]
Re^2: The best library for reading PDF by Mechanizator (Initiate) on Mar 15, 2010 at 13:19 UTC
Ok , best for me means that has complete functionalities for reading the text . I don't like to discover , maybe after some months of use , that I cannot update the code simply because the function I need has not been implemented ....	[reply]
Re^3: The best library for reading PDF by marto (Cardinal) on Mar 15, 2010 at 13:31 UTC
Given that you can see the source for these modules you could add your own functionality for whatever unimplemented feature you may need.	[reply]