Extract text from a pdf

Convert pdf to plain text, even on empty and encrypted files. This package is based on spatie/pdf-to-text.

Requirements

Behind the scenes this package leverages pdftotext. You can verify if the binary installed on your system by issueing this command:

which pdftotext

If it is installed it will return the path to the binary.

To install the binary you can use this command on Ubuntu or Debian:

apt-get install poppler-utils

On a mac you can install the binary using brew

brew install poppler

If you're on RedHat or CentOS use this:

yum install poppler-utils

To use the OCR functionality, install the following dependencies, in accordance to your package manager. The following example is based on Ubuntu.

apt-get install tesseract-ocr ocrmypdf

To use the decryption functionality, install the following dependencies, in accordance to your package manager.

#this is Debian based
apt-get install qpdf

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require spatie/pdf-to-text

Usage

Extracting text from a pdf is easy.

$text = (new Pdf())
    ->setPdf('book.pdf')
    ->text();

Or easier:

echo Pdf::getText('book.pdf');

By default the package will assume that the pdftotext command is located at /usr/bin/pdftotext. If it is located elsewhere pass its binary path to constructor

$text = (new Pdf('/custom/path/to/pdftotext'))
    ->setPdf('book.pdf')
    ->text();

or as the second parameter to the getText static method:

echo Pdf::getText('book.pdf', '/custom/path/to/pdftotext');

Sometimes you may want to use pdftotext options. To do so you can set them up using the setOptions method.

$text = (new Pdf())
    ->setPdf('table.pdf')
    ->setOptions(['layout', 'r 96'])
    ->text()
;

or as the third parameter to the getText static method:

echo Pdf::getText('book.pdf', null, ['layout', 'opw myP1$$Word']);

Please note that successive calls to setOptions() will overwrite options passed in during previous calls.

If you need to make multiple calls to add options (for example if you need to pass in default options when creating the Pdf object from a container, and then add context-specific options elsewhere), you can use the addOptions() method:

$text = (new Pdf())
    ->setPdf('table.pdf')
    ->setOptions(['layout', 'r 96'])
    ->addOptions(['f 1'])
    ->text()
;

To extract data from empty files, use the scan method, with it's respective options setter. The method decrypt opens "encrypted" files with empty passwords.

$text = (new Pdf())
    ->setPdf('table.pdf')
    ->setOptions(['layout', 'r 96'])
    ->addOptions(['f 1'])
    ->setScanOptions(['-l nld+eng', '--skip-text'])
    ->scan()
    ->decrypt()
    ->text()
;

Testing

 composer test

Credits

• Freek Van der Herten
• Dragomir Țurcanu
• All Contributors

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.