Re:Ask HN: Any software to parse a PDF word by word? (maybe ...
by MaDeuce on Saturday September 12, 2015 @09:08PM
(#10209982)
Here are a couple of ideas, none of which do exactly what you want. However, they may give you some ideas...
PDFMiner[1] is a python toolkit for PDF. Among other things, it extracts text from PDF files. It also has a tool that lets you find objects and their coordinates in a PDF file. I have not looked at the latter functionality, but it may get you your words and locations.
I've used Tesseract[2] to convert scanned documents into searchable PDF files. Since a search of the PDF file will highlight matching words in the scanned document, it clearly knows where words are and the letters that comprise them. This might be another approach.
PDFMiner[1] is a python toolkit for PDF. Among other things, it extracts text from PDF files. It also has a tool that lets you find objects and their coordinates in a PDF file. I have not looked at the latter functionality, but it may get you your words and locations.
I've used Tesseract[2] to convert scanned documents into searchable PDF files. Since a search of the PDF file will highlight matching words in the scanned document, it clearly knows where words are and the letters that comprise them. This might be another approach.
[1] https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/wiki/ReadMe [2] https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/wiki/ReadMe