PDF Text Extract

Extract text from pdfs that contain searchable pdf text. The module is wrapper that calls the pdftotext command to perform the actual extraction

Installation

npm install pdf-text-extract

You will need the pdftotext binary available on your path. There are packages available for many different operating systems

See https://github.com/nisaacson/pdf-extract#osx for how to install the pdftotext command

Usage

As a module

var filePath = path.join(__dirname, 'test/data/multipage.pdf')
var extract = require('pdf-text-extract')
extract(filePath, function (err, pages) {
  if (err) {
    console.dir(err)
    return
  }
  console.dir(pages)
})

The output will be an array of where each entry is a page of text. If you want just a string of all pages you can do pages.join(' ')

If needed you can pass an optional arguments to the extract function. These will be passed to the command

var filePath = path.join(__dirname, 'test/data/multipage.pdf')
var extract = require('pdf-text-extract')
var options = {
  cwd: "./"
}
extract(filePath, options, function (err, pages) {
  if (err) {
    console.dir(err)
    return
  }
  console.dir('extracted pages', pages)
})

As a command line tool

npm install -g pdf-text-extract

Execute with the filePath as an argument. Output will be json-formatted array of pages

pdf-text-extract ./test/data/multipage.pdf
# outputs
# ['<page 1 content...>', '<page 2 content...>']

Test

# install dev dependencies
npm install
# run tests
npm test