Open Source Python PDF Parser Library
Free & Open-source Python library to parse PDFs and extract text with formatting information.
What is pdfminer.six?
Pdfminer.six is an open source Python library and toolset for extracting data from PDF documents. You can parse PDF documents and extract text, table of contents & tagged contents etc. from PDFs for data analysis.
Here's a brief list of its parsing features:
- Text Extraction: Extract text content from PDF documents including layout and formatting information like text color, font and location etc.
- Font Information Extraction: Extract information about the fonts used in PDF documents.
Getting Started with pdfminer.six
You need Python version 3.6.0 or higher to install and use pypdf. So, first install Python and then use below commands to install pypdf on your machine using pip and virtual environment.
Linux
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install pdfminer.six
MacOS
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install pdfminer.six
Windows
python3 -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate.bat
pip install pdfminer.six
Extract Text from PDF Document
You can use the pdfminer.six library in Python to extract text from a PDF document by using the extract_text function as shown in the below code snippet:
Output
The following screenshot shows the text extracted from the PDF document:
Extract Font Information From PDF Document
We can also extract the information about the fonts used in the PDF Document such as the font name and font size by iterating through layout elements of each page in the PDF. For example, check below code snippet:
Output
The following screenshot shows the font information extracted from the PDF document:
Conclusion
In conclusion, pdfminer.six has abilities to extract text and other information from PDF documents but it lacks in functionalities such as extracting images and tables from PDFs.
It is important to note that pdfminer.six library supports extracting PDF pages as images but it's different from extracting images embedded in the PDF documents which is not supported by pdfminer.six. However, developers can still rely on it for parsing PDFs in Python to extract text for their data analysis needs.