Raymond Camden's ColdFusion Blog: Reading text from a PDF in ColdFusion 8

Reading text from a PDF in ColdFusion 8

Yesterday I blogged about ColdFusion and DDX, a way to some fancy-pants neato transformations of PDF documents. One of the cooler examples was that DDX could be used to grab the text from a PDF file. For those who thought it might be too difficult to use the DDX, I've wrapped up the code in a new ColdFusion Component I'm calling PDF Utils. (Coming to a RIAForge near you soon. Watch the skies...)

Right now the CFC has one method, getText. You pass in the path to a PDF and you get an array of pages. Each item in the array is the text on that particular page. I've included on this blog post two sample PDFs. One is a normal PDF with simple text. As you can imagine, the function works great with it. The other one is a highly graphical, wacky looking PDF. Ok it isn't wacky looking per se, but it isn't a simple letter. When the method is run on this PDF, the text does come back, but it is a bit crazy looking. I think this is to be expected though. And what's cool is that if your intent is to get the text out for searching/indexing purposes, you can still find it useful.

Anyway, here is a sample:

view plain print about

<cfset pdf = createObject("component", "pdfutils")>

<cfset mypdf = expandPath("./paristoberead.pdf")>

<cfset results = pdf.getText(mypdf)>
<cfdump var="#results#">

1  <cfset pdf = createObject("component", "pdfutils")>
2
3  <cfset mypdf = expandPath("./paristoberead.pdf")>
4
5  <cfset results = pdf.getText(mypdf)>
6  <cfdump var="#results#">

Which gives this result:

The zip includes 2 PDFs, the component, and my test script.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 1:45 PM. It was filed in the following categories: ColdFusion. It has been viewed 5,490 times and has 27 comments. Download attached file.

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Comment 1 written by Ben Nadel on 25 July 2007, at 3:58 PM

A PDF utility component... that just all the makings of a massively popular CFC :)
Comment 2 written by Raymond Camden on 25 July 2007, at 4:01 PM

My next utility will be pageGet. Right now you can easily delete pages, but what if you want just one page? Well the answer is to obviously delete everything else, but I'll have a utility function to make it easier.

I've actually got an entire online PDF Editor I worked on for the CF8 tour. I'm going to load it up when I wrap the CFPDF series.
Comment 3 written by Ben Nadel on 25 July 2007, at 4:07 PM

That's gonna be sweet! I work with a lot of legal clients and they all but worship the PDF as a medium.
Comment 4 written by Lola LB on 26 July 2007, at 6:55 AM

Cool! I can see a lot of use for those PDF utils.
Comment 5 written by O?uz Demirkap? on 10 September 2007, at 12:56 PM

Any update for pdfutils? :)
Comment 6 written by Raymond Camden on 10 September 2007, at 1:00 PM

I haven't done anything special with it - but it probably is time to release it at RIAForge. Oguz, if I don't by EOD, yell at me.
Comment 7 written by Mark on 4 April 2008, at 10:52 PM

The demo doesnt seem to just work.
test.cfm seems OK
test2.cfm dumps the PDFDocument structure? Is the cfpdf write failing silently?
genpdf.cfm works (just try paristoread_new.pdf or whatever)
xmptest.cfm returns [empty string] no matter what I try. . ...
Comment 8 written by Raymond Camden on 5 April 2008, at 12:36 PM

If you look at test2, you will see it does indeed dump out the pdf structure. That is expected. And it should overwrite page2.pdf.

As for xmptest.cfm, it will be empty if your PDF doesn't use XMP. Not all pdfs do. If you think your does and it doesn't work, email me the PDF.
Comment 9 written by Johnny on 22 July 2008, at 10:07 AM

Nice component.
Can I do the same in MX7?
Thanks
Comment 10 written by Raymond Camden on 24 July 2008, at 9:39 AM

Not that I know of.
Comment 11 written by Tim on 29 September 2008, at 1:37 PM

Great tool! But it looks like it replaces newline characters with spaces. Is there any way to figure out where they used to be?
Comment 12 written by Raymond Camden on 29 September 2008, at 1:43 PM

I just checked, and my code isn't doing anything to the text. It must be how it comes from DDX.
Comment 13 written by Raymond Camden on 29 September 2008, at 2:09 PM

Dumb question - but if you are outputting it into HTML, don't forget newlines won't be displayed unless you use PRE tags.
Comment 14 written by Armando on 12 February 2009, at 4:53 PM

When I use getText I just get back a blank page. I tried PDFUtils because all my other attempts to use DDX to get text from a pdf also failed - all return a blank page (unless there is an error).

Processing seems to stop as soon as the the cfpdf tag calls processddx.

This is on a shared coldfusion 8 server at crystaltech.
Comment 15 written by Raymond Camden on 14 February 2009, at 10:08 AM

Are you sure processing ends? Do you get an error? What happens when you try DDX my itself?
Comment 16 written by Virginia Neal on 28 May 2010, at 6:24 PM

As you probably know, in CF9 the cfpdf tag can now use action="extracttext" to pull text out of the pdf document. According to the documentation you should also be able to use useStructure="true" along with honourspaces="true" in order to return the structure. However, I have been unable to get this to work. I simply need to get line breaks, centering, and indents/tabs, but no luck thus far. Any ideas?
Thanks
Comment 17 written by Raymond Camden on 30 May 2010, at 8:54 AM

How is it _not_ working? Do you get a syntax error? Something else?
Comment 18 written by Virginia Neal on 1 June 2010, at 9:18 AM

The cfpdf tag is extracting the content of the pdf file and it is readable; however, the basic structure of the document is lost. There are no line breaks, no indenting, no centering.
I have tried both .doc and .docx. Code is simple
<cfpdf useStructure="true" addquads="false" honourspaces="true" type="string" action="extracttext" source="test.docx.pdf" name="pdfToText" />
The document is simple and contains about 7 lines, just enough to test line breaks, indents, and centering.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Comment 19 written by Raymond Camden on 1 June 2010, at 9:21 AM

Just to be dumb - how are you testing that line breaks were removed? Remember that if you just output it to the browser, since it is an HTML environment, you won't see the line breaks unless you view source.
Comment 20 written by Virginia Neal on 1 June 2010, at 9:34 AM

I wrote the results to a text file and checked the content of the file. BTW, I also tried the extract using type='xml' and that did not work any better.
Comment 21 written by Raymond Camden on 1 June 2010, at 9:35 AM

Interesting. Do you feel comfortable sharing your PDF with me?
Comment 22 written by Virginia Neal on 1 June 2010, at 9:38 AM

No problem, it is a simple file. How do you want me to send it to you. I don't see a place on your blog where I can upload the file.
Comment 23 written by Raymond Camden on 1 June 2010, at 9:40 AM

Email it to me. ray at camdenfamily dot com
Comment 24 written by Raymond Camden on 1 June 2010, at 10:21 AM

Well I wish I had something nice to report, but I don't. I'm seeing the same as you. I also tried my pdfutils component (even though I assumed Adobe was using the exact same code (ddx) for theirs) and I got the same result. If you use the quads option you DO seem to get the proper data, but you would need to 'draw' it on screen to get it which would be overkill.

This may be a bit much - but you could use Google Docs. I have a wrapper CFC for it. You could upload to Google Docs than download as HTML or text. It would be slow(well slowish), but if you needed it for one time conversions, it would be acceptable I think.
Comment 25 written by Virginia Neal on 1 June 2010, at 10:30 AM

Thanks much for trying!!
I had also tried the DDX approach and the quads option. I had briefly considered using the coordinates, but the docs I need to convert are gigantic and I get as many as 40 a day. Given that, I don't think the Google approach will work either. I have 3rd party software that currently converts Word to PDF and to Text, but I had hoped to get rid of the software and let CF do both. With CF 9, I am now able to convert the docs to PDF, but thus far no easy way to go to text. Maybe the POI will work.
Comment 26 written by Raymond Camden on 1 June 2010, at 10:32 AM

Well, 40 isn't so much. If you assume 1 minute of network time to do the 'work' (really, Google is), I'd call this fair. I'd just do it behind the scenes - ie not make the user wait for it.

As to your 3rd party tool - shoot, if it works, use it! I'd brush my teeth with ColdFusion if I could, but at the end of the day, you want to use what works best.
Comment 27 written by Virginia Neal on 1 June 2010, at 10:42 AM

That is 40 gigantic docs all in one batch with processing handled, as you said, "behind the scenes". Going to a complete CF solution, without the 3rd party conversion software, would save us some bucks, and small government agencies are all about saving money. :-)

Anyway, thanks again for your help!! It is good to know it is not just me and banging my head for another week won't change the fact that the tag won't work!