A node to help extract text contents from a pdf. Uses the Mozilla library found at https://github.com/mozilla/pdfjs-dist to extract text data.

Inputs

payload

Either a buffer object that corresponds to a pdf file or a filepath leading to a pdf file to be decoded.

Config

filename

If a file path/object is not provided in the payload, A file path to a pdf file should be provided here to be decoded.

Order text

Check this option to force the text to be ordered top down using the y value if 'from top to bottom' is selected, or ordered left to right by it's x value if 'from left to right' is selected. If both options are selected, it will order from top to bottom, then left to right.

Merge text with next text

When inserting text into output payload array, if the previous text inserted has the same x value (are in the same column), or same y value (are in the same row), it will concatenate the string to be inserted with the previous string with a space instead.

Outputs

payload

Results of the parsing will be returned as an array with each element in the array corresponding to a page in the pdf. Each page in the array is stored as an array of objects which can be seen below.

[
	{
		"p": 1, // order on the page
		"x": 328.78, // distance away from the right edge
		"y": 1175.676, // distance away from the bottom of the page
		"t": "Survey Responses 1/02/21 - 31/04/21" // text content
	},
	{
		"p": 2, 
		"x": 428.78, 
		"y": 1175.676, 
		"t": "Survey Responses 1/05/21 - 31/07/21"
	}
]