How to extract text and text coordinates from a PDF file?

Question

I want to extract all the text boxes and text box coordinates from a PDF file with PDFMiner.

Many other Stack Overflow posts address how to extract all text in an ordered fashion, but how can I do the intermediate step of getting the text and text locations?

Given a PDF file, output should look something like:

489, 41,  "Signature"
500, 52,  "b"
630, 202, "a_g_i_r"

Answer 1

Newlines are converted to underscores in final output. This is the minimal working solution that I found.

from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFParser
from pdfminer.pdfdocument import PDFDocument
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFTextExtractionNotAllowed
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.pdfdevice import PDFDevice
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from pdfminer.converter import PDFPageAggregator
import pdfminer

# Open a PDF file.
fp = open('/Users/me/Downloads/test.pdf', 'rb')

# Create a PDF parser object associated with the file object.
parser = PDFParser(fp)

# Create a PDF document object that stores the document structure.
# Password for initialization as 2nd parameter
document = PDFDocument(parser)

# Check if the document allows text extraction. If not, abort.
if not document.is_extractable:
    raise PDFTextExtractionNotAllowed

# Create a PDF resource manager object that stores shared resources.
rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()

# Create a PDF device object.
device = PDFDevice(rsrcmgr)

# BEGIN LAYOUT ANALYSIS
# Set parameters for analysis.
laparams = LAParams()

# Create a PDF page aggregator object.
device = PDFPageAggregator(rsrcmgr, laparams=laparams)

# Create a PDF interpreter object.
interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)

def parse_obj(lt_objs):

    # loop over the object list
    for obj in lt_objs:

        # if it's a textbox, print text and location
        if isinstance(obj, pdfminer.layout.LTTextBoxHorizontal):
            print "%6d, %6d, %s" % (obj.bbox[0], obj.bbox[1], obj.get_text().replace('\n', '_'))

        # if it's a container, recurse
        elif isinstance(obj, pdfminer.layout.LTFigure):
            parse_obj(obj._objs)

# loop over all pages in the document
for page in PDFPage.create_pages(document):

    # read the page into a layout object
    interpreter.process_page(page)
    layout = device.get_result()

    # extract text from this object
    parse_obj(layout._objs)