Extract Images and Words with coordinates and size

Question

I've read much about PDF extractions and libraries (as iText) but i just haven't found a solution to extract images and text (with coordinates) from a PDF.

The task is to scan PDF with catalog of products and extract each image. There is an image code printed next to each image and also a list of product codes for products that are shown on the image.

I know that there is no way to extract structured info from a PDF like this but with coordinates of all image and text objects I could write code to identify linked text by its distance from the image. Then I could split text using a RegExp and find out what is a product code, what is an image code etc.

Could you recommend a good and working solution for the task?

Answer 1

If a commercial library is an option for you, you could try Amyuni PDF Creator .Net or Amyuni PDF Creator ActiveX. You could use the method IacDocument.GetObjectsInRectangle to retrieve all the "graphic objects" of your interest, then use the ObjectType attribute to separate images from text. The library already provides an algorithm for putting close text together. From the documentation:

IacDocument.GetObjectsInRectangle Method

The GetObjectsInRectangle method gets all the objects that are in the specified rectangle.

Usual disclaimer applies.

Answer 2

Several Java libraries can do this. Have you looked at JPedal or PdfBox?

Answer 3

Use XPDF (http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/)

It can extract all the characters in the PDF with co-ordinates (pdftotext -bbox [sourcefile] [outputfile]) and also all the images and SVGs in the PDF.

It's open source (GPLv2) and supports a lot of additional extraction functionalities as well.