poppler-native
v2.3.0
Published
A native interface to the Poppler PDF parser for NodeJS.
Downloads
50
Readme
Poppler for Node
Allows you to use the native Poppler C++ backend to efficiently parse PDF files from NodeJS. Outputs similar information to pdftohtml -xml -stdout test.pdf
(with pdftohtml
from the poppler-utils
package), because it uses parts of the same codebase which have been rewritten to output N-API objects instead of XML code. All contained functions return JavaScript promises.
Getting started
- dependencies:
build-essential
; curl, PNG, JPEG and FreeType development headers; ghostscript, python, mupdf-tools, qpdf npm install poppler-native
(only tested on Ubuntu 16.04 and 20.04 so far)
// allows filename...
const pdf = require('poppler-native');
pdf.info('test.pdf').then(res => console.log(res));
// ...or buffer with raw PDF bytes directly
const fs = require('fs-extra');
fs.readFile('test.pdf')
.then(f => pdf.info(f))
.then(res => console.log(res));
// you also have the option to convert the PDF to a PS and then reconvert it to PDF again via GhostScript before extracting data from it, which can sometimes help when wrong characters are extracted with the default method:
pdf.info('test.pdf', { reconvertThroughPS: true });
In order to visualize the parsed text boxes and images, you can also write the entire output from the pdf.info
function into a JSON file, then open the file misc/pdf-json-viewer.html
in any web browser and drag-and-drop the JSON file there.
Contributing
Updating Poppler
This is obviously only necessary when a new version of Poppler is released. According to their readme, the internal Poppler C++ API, which is the foundation of this project, might be subject to breaking changes, even in minor releases. Consequently, evaluate new Poppler versions thoroughly before updating.
- Download the Poppler sources from here.
- Put all
*.h
,*.c
and*.cc
files frompoppler-20.11.0/goo
intonative/poppler/goo
. The same forfofi
andpoppler
. Do not change the existing two config files. - Remove the following files from the
native/poppler/poppler
directory:CairoFontEngine.cc CairoFontEngine.h CairoOutputDev.cc CairoOutputDev.h CairoRescaleBox.cc CairoRescaleBox.h GlobalParamsWin.cc JPEG2000Stream.cc JPEG2000Stream.h SignatureHandler.cc SignatureHandler.h SplashOutputDev.cc SplashOutputDev.h
- Remove the line
#include "splash/SplashTypes.h"
fromnative/poppler/poppler/GfxState.cc
.
License
GPLv2 or later, because the Poppler source is bundled.