PDFBOX, Reading a pdf line by line and extracting

Question

I am using pdfbox to extract text from pdf files. I read the pdf document as follows

    PDFParser parser = null;
    String text = "";
    PDFTextStripper stripper = null;
    PDDocument pdoc = null;
    COSDocument cdoc = null;
    File file = new File("path");

    try {
        parser = new PDFParser(new FileInputStream(file));
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    try {
        parser.parse();
        cdoc = parser.getDocument();
        stripper = new PDFTextStripper();
        pdoc = new PDDocument(cdoc);
        stripper.setStartPage(1);
        stripper.setEndPage(2);
        text = stripper.getText(pdoc);
        System.out.println(text);
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

But what I want to do is read the document line by line and to extract the text properties such as bold,italic, from each line. How can I achieve this with pdfbox library

Answer 1

extract the text properties such as bold,italic, from each line. How can I achieve this with pdfbox library

Properties such as bold and italic are not first-class properties in a PDF.

Bold or italic writing in PDFs is achieved either using

• different fonts (which is the better way); in this case one can try to determine whether or not the fonts are bold or italic by

  • looking at the font name: it may contain a substring "bold", "italic", "oblique"...

  • looking at some optional properties of the font, e.g. font weight...

  • inspecting embedded font file.

  Neither of these methods is fool-proof; or

• using the same font as for non-bold, non-italic text but using special techniques to make them appear bold or italic (aka poor man's bold), e.g.

  • not only filling the glyph contours but also drawing a thicker line along it for a bold impression,

  • drawing the glyph twice, the second time slightly displaced, also for a bold impression,

  • using a text or transformation matrix to slant the letters for an italic impression.

By overriding the PDFTextStripper methods with such tests accordingly, you may achieve a fairly good guess rate for styles during PDF text extraction.