Extract Text from a PDF File in Java

Extract Text from a PDF File in Java

In this fast-paced world, the volume of data is expanding exponentially. PDF files are being immensely used to store and represent data. It becomes hard to go through a large number of PDF pages to access useful paragraphs. Therefore, we will learn how to extract text from a PDF File in Java programmatically. However, automating the whole process of text extraction will save time, and effort and will bring efficiency. We will use an easy-to-install PDF Java library that offers configurable methods to work with PDF files.

The following points will be covered in this blog post:

PDF Java library - installation steps

You can install this library easily in your Java application by downloading the jar files, or you can follow the following Maven configurations.

Repository

<repository>
    <id>AsposeJavaAPI</id>
    <name>Aspose Java API</name>
    <url>https://repository.aspose.com/repo/</url>
</repository>

Dependency

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.aspose</groupId>
    <artifactId>aspose-pdf</artifactId>
    <version>20.12</version>
    <classifier>jdk17</classifier>
</dependency>

Extract Text from a PDF File in Java

In this section, we will write the steps and code snippet that extracts text from all the pages of a PDF document.

Go through the following steps:

  1. Open a PDF document by creating an object of the Document class.
  2. Initialize an object of TextAbsorber class to perform text extraction.
  3. Call the getPages() method that accepts the absorber for all the pages.
  4. Get the extracted text by calling getText() method.
  5. Write extracted text to the file and close the writer.

Copy and paste the following code snippet to extract text from PDF document programmatically.

How to extract text from a particular page region

This library also enables you to extract text from the desired page of a PDF document.

We will follow the following steps to achieve this:

  1. Create an object of the Document class and load a source PDF file.
  2. Instantiate an object of TextAbsorber class to extract data.
  3. Call getTextSearchOptions() method that allows to define rectangle which delimits the extracted text.
  4. Invoke getPages() to get the collection of document pages and accept the absorber for the first page.
  5. Call getText() to get the extracted text and write it to the file.
  6. Call close() method to close the stream.

Copy and paste the following code snippet in your Java file:

Java library to extract text from PDF file in paragraphs form

This section demonstrates the following steps and the code snippets to extract data from PDF documents in paragraphs.

  1. Initialize an object of Document class and load a source PDF file.
  2. Create an object of ParagraphAbsorber class.
  3. Call visit(Document doc) that performs a search for sections and paragraphs on the specified document.
  4. Invoke getPageMarkups() to gets collection of PageMarkup that were absorbed.
  5. Loop through the collection of MarkupSection that was found on the page using getSections() method.
  6. Invoke this getParagraphs() method that gets the collection of MarkupParagraph that was found on the page.
  7. Call getLines() method to iterate lines of the paragraph.

Get a Free License

You can get a free temporary license to try the API without evaluation limitations.

Summing up

This brings us to the end of this article. We have gone through how to extract text from a PDF File in Java programmatically. In addition, we have gone through the code snippets to extract text from a particular page region and also have explored text extraction in paragraph form. Moreover, you may go through the documentation to explore other features of this PDF Java library. Finally, conholdate.com is consistently writing new blog posts. Therefore, please stay in touch for the latest updates.

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