PDF Text Reader

Dead simple PDF text reader.

Install

npm install pdf-text-reader

Usage

import {readPdfText} from 'pdf-text-reader';

async function run() {
    const pages = await readPdfText('path/to/pdf/file.pdf');
    console.log(pages[0].lines);
}

run();

See src/index.ts (in the git repo) or dist/index.d.ts (in the npm package when installed locally) for detailed argument and return value typing.

Details

This uses Mozilla's pdf.js package through its pdfjs-dist distribution on npm. As such, any valid input to pdf.js's getDocument function are valid inputs to this package's readPdfText function. See pdfjs-dist's types folder for more info on that or, for just the type information, read src/index.ts in this repo.

This package simply reads the output of pdfjs.getDocument and sorts it into lines based on the text vertical position in the document. It also inserts spaces for text on the same line that is far apart horizontally and new lines in between lines that are far apart vertically.

Example:

The text below in a PDF will be read as having spaces in between them even if the space characters aren't in the PDF.

cell 1               cell 2                 cell 3

The number of spaces to insert is calculated by an extremely naive but very simple calculation of Math.ceil(distance-between-text/text-height).

Low Level Control

If you need lower level parsing control, you can also use the exported parsePageItems function. This only reads one page at a time as seen below. This function is used by readPdfText so the output will be identical for the same pdf page.

You must have the pdfjs-dist npm package independently installed to do this.

import {parsePageItems} from 'pdf-text-reader';
import * as pdfjs from 'pdfjs-dist';
// you might need this version of the import:
// import * as pdfjs from 'pdfjs-dist/legacy/build/pdf';

async function run() {
    const doc = await pdfjs.getDocument('myDocument.pdf').promise;
    const page = await doc.getPage(1);
    const content = await page.getTextContent();
    const items = content.items;
    const parsedPage = parsePageItems(items);
    console.log(parsedPage.lines);
}

run();

See src/index.ts (in the git repo) or dist/index.d.ts (in the npm package when installed locally) for detailed argument and return value typing.