pdftotext

Simple PDF text extraction

import pdftotext

# Load your PDF
with open("lorem_ipsum.pdf", "rb") as f:
    pdf = pdftotext.PDF(f)

# If it's password-protected
with open("secure.pdf", "rb") as f:
    pdf = pdftotext.PDF(f, "secret")

# How many pages?
print(len(pdf))

# Iterate over all the pages
for page in pdf:
    print(page)

# Read some individual pages
print(pdf[0])
print(pdf[1])

# Read all the text into one string
print("\n\n".join(pdf))

Why

I needed to index a lot of PDF documents with Python. Existing solutions were slow, complicated, or both. That might not be true anymore!

Dependencies

Debian, Ubuntu, and friends

sudo apt install build-essential libpoppler-cpp-dev python3-dev

Fedora, Red Hat, and friends

sudo yum install gcc-c++ poppler-cpp-devel python3-devel

macOS

brew install poppler python

Install

pip install pdftotext