The apache pdfbox does not support HTML to PDF conversion.
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The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format that helps to present data in a manner that is independent of Application software, hardware, and operating systems.
Each PDF file holds description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it.
There are several libraries available to create and manipulate PDF documents through programs, such as −
- Adobe PDF Library − This library provides API in languages such as C++, .NET and Java and using this we can edit, view print and extract text from PDF documents.
- Formatting Objects Processor − Open-source print formatter driven by XSL Formatting Objects and an output independent formatter. The primary output target is PDF.
- iText − This library provides API in languages such as Java, C#, and other .NET languages and using this library we can create and manipulate PDF, RTF and HTML documents.
- JasperReports − This is a Java reporting tool which generates reports in PDF document including Microsoft Excel, RTF, ODT, comma-separated values and XML files.
What is a PDFBox
Apache PDFBox is an open-source Java library that supports the development and conversion of PDF documents. Using this library, you can develop Java programs that create, convert and manipulate PDF documents.
In addition to this, PDFBox also includes a command line utility for performing various operations over PDF using the available Jar file.
![Apache Pdfbox Pdf To Html Apache Pdfbox Pdf To Html](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125852023/550584201.png)
Features of PDFBox
Following are the notable features of PDFBox −
- Extract Text − Using PDFBox, you can extract Unicode text from PDF files.
- Split & Merge − Using PDFBox, you can divide a single PDF file into multiple files, and merge them back as a single file.
- Fill Forms − Using PDFBox, you can fill the form data in a document.
- Print − Using PDFBox, you can print a PDF file using the standard Java printing API.
- Save as Image − Using PDFBox, you can save PDFs as image files, such as PNG or JPEG.
- Create PDFs − Using PDFBox, you can create a new PDF file by creating Java programs and, you can also include images and fonts.
- Signing− Using PDFBox, you can add digital signatures to the PDF files.
Applications of PDFBox
The following are the applications of PDFBox −
- Apache Nutch − Apache Nutch is an open-source web-search software. It builds on Apache Lucene, adding web-specifics, such as a crawler, a link-graph database, parsers for HTML and other document formats, etc.
- Apache Tika − Apache Tika is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries.
Components of PDFBox
The following are the four main components of PDFBox −
- PDFBox − This is the main part of the PDFBox. This contains the classes and interfaces related to content extraction and manipulation.
- FontBox − This contains the classes and interfaces related to font, and using these classes we can modify the font of the text of the PDF document.
- XmpBox − This contains the classes and interfaces that handle XMP metadata.
- Preflight − This component is used to verify the PDF files against the PDF/A-1b standard.
I need to parse a PDF file which contains tabular data. I’m using PDFBox to extract the file text to parse the result (String) later. The problem is that the text extraction doesn’t work as I expected for tabular data. For example, I have a file which contains a table like this (7 columns: the first two always have data, only one Complexity column has data, only one Financing column has data):
Then I use PDFBox:
Those two lines of data would be extracted like this:
There are no white spaces between the last two numbers, but this is not the biggest problem. The problem is that I don’t know what the last two numbers mean: Medium, High, Not applicable? MAC/Other, FAE? I don’t have the relation between the numbers and their columns.
It is not required for me to use the PDFBox library, so a solution that uses another library is fine. What I want is to be able to parse the file and know what each parsed number means.
Answers:
You will need to devise an algorithm to extract the data in a usable format. Regardless of which PDF library you use, you will need to do this. Characters and graphics are drawn by a series of stateful drawing operations, i.e. move to this position on the screen and draw the glyph for character ‘c’.
I suggest that you extend
org.apache.pdfbox.pdfviewer.PDFPageDrawer
and override the strokePath
method. From there you can intercept the drawing operations for horizontal and vertical line segments and use that information to determine the column and row positions for your table. Then its a simple matter of setting up text regions and determining which numbers/letters/characters are drawn in which region. Since you know the layout of the regions, you’ll be able to tell which column the extracted text belongs to.Also, the reason you may not have spaces between text that is visually separated is that very often, a space character is not drawn by the PDF. Instead the text matrix is updated and a drawing command for ‘move’ is issued to draw the next character and a “space width” apart from the last one.
Good luck.
Answers:
It may be too late for my answer, but I think this is not that hard. You can extend the PDFTextStripper class and override the writePage() and processTextPosition(…) methods. In your case I assume that the column headers are always the same. That means that you know the x-coordinate of each column heading and you can compare the the x-coordinate of the numbers to those of the column headings. If they are close enough (you have to test to decide how close) then you can say that that number belongs to that column.
Another approach would be to intercept the “charactersByArticle” Vector after each page is written:
Knowing your columns, you can do your comparison of the x-coordinates to decide what column every number belongs to.
The reason you don’t have any spaces between numbers is because you have to set the word separator string.
I hope this is useful to you or to others who might be trying similar things.
Answers:
I had used many tools to extract table from pdf file but it didn’t work for me.
So i have implemented my own algorithm ( its name is
traprange
) to parse tabular data in pdf files. Following are some sample pdf files and results:
- Input file: sample-1.pdf, result: sample-1.html
- Input file: sample-4.pdf, result: sample-4.html
Visit my project page at traprange.
Answers:
You can extract text by area in PDFBox. See the
ExtractByArea.java
example file, in the pdfbox-examples
artifact if you’re using Maven. A snippet looks likeThe problem is getting the coordinates in the first place. I’ve had success extending the normal
TextStripper
, overriding processTextPosition(TextPosition text)
and printing out the coordinates for each character and figuring out where in the document they are.But there’s a much simpler way, at least if you’re on a Mac. Open the PDF in Preview, ⌘I to show the Inspector, choose the Crop tab and make sure the units are in Points, from the Tools menu choose Rectangular selection, and select the area of interest. If you select an area, the inspector will show you the coordinates, which you can round and feed into the
Rectangle
constructor arguments. You just need to confirm where the origin is, using the first method.Answers:
I’ve had decent success with parsing text files generated by the pdftotext utility (sudo apt-get install poppler-utils).
Answers:
Extracting data from PDF is bound to be fraught with problems. Are the documents created through some kind of automatic process? If so, you might consider converting the PDFs to uncompressed PostScript (try pdf2ps) and seeing if the PostScript contains some sort of regular pattern which you can exploit.
Answers:
I had the same problem in reading the pdf file in which data is in tabular format. After regular parse using PDFBox each row were extracted with comma as a separator… losing the columnar position.
To resolve this I used PDFTextStripperByArea and using coordinates I extracted the data column by column for each row. This is provided that you have a fixed format pdf.
To resolve this I used PDFTextStripperByArea and using coordinates I extracted the data column by column for each row. This is provided that you have a fixed format pdf.
Then row 2 and so on…
Answers:
There’s PDFLayoutTextStripper that was designed to keep the format of the data.
![Apache Pdfbox Pdf To Html Apache Pdfbox Pdf To Html](https://cdn.e-iceblue.com/images/art_images/convert-PDF-to-HTML-1.png)
From the README:
Answers:
http://swftools.org/ these guys have a pdf2swf component. They are also able to show tables.
They are also giving the source. So you could possibly check it out.
They are also giving the source. So you could possibly check it out.
Answers:
This works fine if PDF file has “Only Rectangular table” using pdfbox 2.0.6. Won’t work with any other table only Rectangular table.
Answers:
You can use PDFBox’s
PDFTableStripperByArea
class to extract text from a specific region of a document. You can build on this by identifying the region each cell of the table. This isn’t provided out of the box, but the example DrawPrintTextLocations
class demonstrates how you can parse the bounding boxes of individual characters in a document (it would be great to parse bounding boxes of strings or paragraphs, but I haven’t seen support in PDFBox for this – see this question). You can use this approach to group up all touching bounding boxes to identify distinct cells of a table. One way to do this is to maintain a set boxes
of Rectangle2D
regions and then for each parsed character find the character’s bounding box as in DrawPrintTextLocations.writeString(String string, List<TextPosition> textPositions)
and merge it with the existing contents.You can then pass these regions to
PDFTableStripperByArea
.You can also go one further and separate out the horizontal and vertical components of these regions, and so infer regions of all the table’s cells, regardless of whether then hold any content.
I have had cause to perform these steps, and eventually wrote my own
PDFTableStripper
class using PDFBox. I’ve shared my code as a gist on GitHub. The main
method gives an example of how the class can be used:Answers:
I’m not familiar with PDFBox, but you could try looking at itext. Even though the homepage says PDF generation, you can also do PDF manipulation and extraction. Have a look and see if it fits your use case.
Answers:
How about printing to image and doing OCR on that?
Sounds terribly ineffective, but it’s practically the very purpose of PDF to make text inaccessible, you gotta do what you gotta do.
Answers:
For reading content of the table from pdf file,you have to do only just convert the pdf file into a text file by using any API(I have use PdfTextExtracter.getTextFromPage() of iText) and then read that txt file by your java program..now after reading it the major task is done.. you have to filter the data of your need. you can do it by continuously using split method of String class until you find record of your intrest.. here is my code by which I have extract part of record by an PDF file and write it into a .CSV file.. Url of PDF file is..http://www.cea.nic.in/reports/monthly/generation_rep/actual/jan13/opm_02.pdf
Code:-
Tags: file, parsing, pdf