pdf-text-reader
v5.1.0
Published
Dead simple pdf text reader
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PDF Text Reader
Dead simple PDF text reader.
Install
npm install pdf-text-reader
Usage
Read all pages into a single string with
readPdfText
:import {readPdfText} from 'pdf-text-reader'; async function main() { const pdfText: string = await readPdfText({url: 'path/to/pdf/file.pdf'}); console.info(pdfText); } main();
Read a PDF into individual pages with
readPdfPages
:import {readPdfPages} from 'pdf-text-reader'; async function main() { const pages = await readPdfPages({url: 'path/to/pdf/file.pdf'}); console.info(pages[0]?.lines); } main();
See the types for detailed argument and return value types.
Details
This uses Mozilla's pdf.js
package through its pdfjs-dist
distribution on npm.
This package simply reads the output of pdfjs.getDocument
and sorts it into lines based on text position in the document. It also inserts spaces for text on the same line that is far apart horizontally and new lines in between lines that are far apart vertically.
Example:
The text below in a PDF will be read as having spaces in between them even if the space characters aren't in the PDF.
cell 1 cell 2 cell 3
The number of spaces to insert is calculated by an extremely naive but very simple calculation of Math.ceil(distance-between-text/text-height)
.
Low Level Control
If you need lower level parsing control, you can also use the exported parsePageItems
function. This only reads one page at a time as seen below. This function is used by readPdfPages
so the output will be identical for the same pdf page.
You may need to independently install the pdfjs-dist
npm package for this to work.
import * as pdfjs from 'pdfjs-dist';
import type {TextItem} from 'pdfjs-dist/types/src/display/api';
import {parsePageItems} from 'pdf-text-reader';
async function main() {
const doc = await pdfjs.getDocument('myDocument.pdf').promise;
const page = await doc.getPage(1); // 1-indexed
const content = await page.getTextContent();
const items: TextItem[] = content.items.filter((item): item is TextItem => 'str' in item);
const parsedPage = parsePageItems(items);
console.info(parsedPage.lines);
}
main();