Re^2: XPDF pdftotext page loop

[DST609]

Sorry, this is my first post, perhaps I should clarify. There are no page numberstext on the page and I have already used pdfinfo to retrieve the # of pages and I know how to count lines and run the basic regex I need to pull out my data. What I really need to know is how to know where page 1 ends and page 2 starts using xpdf and pdftotext.

[Kenosis]

Since pdftotext defaults to inserting form feed characters between pages, you can examine each line for a form feed character as an indication of pagination:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $i       = 0;
my $pageNum = 1;

open my $fh, "pdftotext -layout multipage.pdf - |" or die $!;
print "---------- Begin Page $pageNum ----------\n";

while ( my $line = <$fh> ) {
    if ( $line =~ /\xC/ ) {
        print "\n---------- End Page $pageNum ----------\n";
        $pageNum++;
        print "---------- Begin Page $pageNum ----------\n";
    }
    
    $i++;
    print "\n<div class=\"line\"><div>$i</div>$line</div>";
}

close $fh;

Another option which may serve you is using CAM::PDF:

use strict;
use warnings;
use CAM::PDF;

my $pdf = CAM::PDF->new('multipage.pdf');

for my $pageNumber ( 1 .. $pdf->numPages() ) {
    my $pageText = $pdf->getPageText($pageNumber);
    my @certainLines = ( split /\n/, $pageText )[ 9 .. 14 ];

    print "---------- Lines 10 - 15 on Page $pageNumber ----------\n";
    print +( join "\n", @certainLines ) . "\n";
    print "---------- End Page $pageNumber ----------\n";
}

The above shows how to grab a range of text lines from the converted pdf page. You may find, however, that pdftotext does a better rendering job.

Hope this helps!

[Anonymous Monk]

That's great. you can't beat pdftotext for rendering the contents of the file being read but I appreciate the CAM::PDF example for a quick alternative that will work in some circumstances.