I am developing a C# application in which I am converting a PDF document to an image and then rendering that image in a custom viewer.
I've come across a bit of a brick wall when trying to search for specific words in the generated image and I was wondering what the best way to go about this would be. Should I find the x,y location of searched word?
You can use tessract OCR image for text recognition in console mode.
I don't know about such SDK for pdf.
BUT, if you want to get all word coordinates and values, you can use next my not complex code, thank nguyenq for hocr hint:
public void Recognize(Bitmap bitmap)
{
bitmap.Save("temp.png", ImageFormat.Png);
var startInfo = new ProcessStartInfo("tesseract.exe", "temp.png temp hocr");
startInfo.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden;
var process = Process.Start(startInfo);
process.WaitForExit();
GetWords(File.ReadAllText("temp.html"));
// Futher actions with words
}
public Dictionary<Rectangle, string> GetWords(string tesseractHtml)
{
var xml = XDocument.Parse(tesseractHtml);
var rectsWords = new Dictionary<System.Drawing.Rectangle, string>();
var ocr_words = xml.Descendants("span").Where(element => element.Attribute("class").Value == "ocr_word").ToList();
foreach (var ocr_word in ocr_words)
{
var strs = ocr_word.Attribute("title").Value.Split(' ');
int left = int.Parse(strs[1]);
int top = int.Parse(strs[2]);
int width = int.Parse(strs[3]) - left + 1;
int height = int.Parse(strs[4]) - top + 1;
rectsWords.Add(new Rectangle(left, top, width, height), ocr_word.Value);
}
return rectsWords;
}
Use ITextSharp download it here.
Make sure the PDF is searchable.
and use this code:
public static string GetTextFromAllPages(String pdfPath)
{
PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(pdfPath);
StringWriter output = new StringWriter();
for (int i = 1; i <= reader.NumberOfPages; i++)
output.WriteLine(PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(reader, i, new SimpleTextExtractionStrategy()));
return output.ToString();
}