python - pdfminer - extract text behind LTFigure object

Question

I am extracting text from pdf files using python pdfminer library (see docs).

However, pdfminer seems unable to extract all texts in some files and extracts LTFigure object instead. Assuming from position of this object it "covers" some of the text and thus this text is not extracted.

Both pdf file and short jupyter notebook with the code extracting information from pdf are in the Github repository I created specifically in order to ask this question:

https://github.com/druskacik/ltfigure-pdfminer

I am not an expert on how pdf files work but common sense tells me that if I can look for the text using control + f in browser, it should be extractable.

I have considered using some other library but the problem is that I also need positions of the extracted words (in order to use them for my machine learning model), which is a functionality only pdfminer seems to provide.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65926516/pdfminer-extract-text-behind-ltfigure-object

Answer 1

Given that you also consider other libraries, I suggest using poppler-util's pdftohtml to convert the pdf to xml:

!apt-get install -y poppler-utils
!pdftohtml -c -hidden -xml document.pdf output.xml

It will output an xml file with the text and top, left, width, and height values for the boxes. It had no issues with the text that pdfminer doesn't recognize.