Programmatically replace text in PDF

pdf pdf-scraping
BramD picture BramD · Jul 6, 2011 · Viewed 8k times · Source

I have PDF files with text that should be replaced. More specificly, the text should be translated and replaced with the translated version. It's important that the rest of the PDF structure stays intact. Note that the text is available in the PDFs and techniques like OCr are not needed. Also, it would be nice if font and other text attributes are kept.

Which libraries would you recommend for extracting the text to an easy to edit format (such as CSV) and put the new text back in again?

Answer

Ed Bayiates picture Ed Bayiates · Jul 6, 2011

Assuming you are replacing text with a different language, you will have to choose a different font in most cases, and the font choice is non-trivial. I've used the Foxit libraries to change text or create PDFs with success.

Related questions

Python module for converting PDF to text

Is there any python module to convert PDF files into text? I tried one piece of code found in Activestate which uses pypdf but the text generated had no space between and was of no use.

Read More
Extract / Identify Tables from PDF python

Are there any open source libraries that support table identification & extraction? By this I mean: Identify a table structure exists Classify the table from its contents Extract data from the table in a useful output format e.g. JSON / …

Read More
How to unlock a "secured" (read-protected) PDF in Python?

In Python I'm using pdfminer to read the text from a pdf with the code below this message. I now get an error message saying: File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pdfminer/pdfpage.py", line 124, in get_pages raise PDFTextExtractionNotAllowed(…

Read More