I feel your pain. I have the (mis)fortune to have to deal with this on a daily basis as $WORK.
The strategy is to use pdftotext.exe to convert PDF into text

*yuck*

If that works, more power to you. I have always ended up with inconsistently spaced blobs of text when I first tried that route. My personal preference is to use pdftohtml.exe. I use the one included in Calibre Portable since it is actively updated.

I use the following command line: pdftohtml.exe -xml -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).

Here is an example I am currently working 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">XXXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</text>
<text top="120" left="115" width="602" height="18" font="0">XXXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</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 Bill
+ing</text>
<text top="220" left="115" width="128" height="18" font="0">SORT GROUP
+:</text>
<text top="220" left="265" width="152" height="18" font="0">Invoice So
+rt 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</t
+ext>
<text top="286" left="545" width="108" height="18" font="0">FOOBAR</te
+xt>
<text top="320" left="115" width="602" height="18" font="0">XXXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</text>
<text top="336" left="115" width="602" height="18" font="0">XXXXXXXXXX
+XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</text>
</page>
/<pdf2html>

[download]

I can then use XML::Simple to slurp each <page> element into a hash and then use Test::More's eq_hash to compare my extracted data with my reference XML hash.

In reply to Re: PDF content and visuals testing best practices by ateague
in thread PDF content and visuals testing best practices by andreas1234567

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