PDF Text Extraction Approach Using OCR

java pdf text-parsing
Jon picture Jon · Apr 22, 2009 · Viewed 13.2k times · Source

Has anybody attempted to extract text from a PDF using an OCR library and Java? What did you find to be the most reliable library for text extraction. Most of the approaches I've seen (tesseract, GOCR) are C libraries that would require some JNI code to be written.

I'm familiar with pdfbox, which is now an Apache incubator project at version 0.8.x, but it's text extraction isn't always accurate. I'm looking for an alternative approach that is somewhat more reliable.

I've not tried Asprise JavaPDF yet, in the process of trying that, but wanted to know more about the OCR approach (if it's possible).

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer

Sam Barnum picture Sam Barnum · Apr 22, 2009

If you have a text-based PDF, I'd strongly recommend PDFTextStream. It's not free, but licensing is reasonable, and it is much much better than PDFBox. PDFBox chokes on many PDF files which are generated by newer tools, and is not too consistent about PDFs it can handle. PDFTextStream handles any PDF I throw at it, including PDFs with embedded PNG images, which PDFBox can not do.

If you heckle the PDFTextStream folks to add OCR, they may listen up.

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