Re: Extracting text from PDF. No really

[chrisdolan]

I'm the author of CAM::PDF. Even under the best circumstances, getpdftext.pl produces barely readable output. My module doesn't have a renderer, so the text extraction is a total hack that I tossed into the module for fun.

I'm quite pleased that other tools have produced good results! CAM::PDF (which I barely maintain anymore, I'm sorry to say) is optimized for high-performance, low-level editing of PDF documents.

[clinton]

Thanks for responding, Chris. You'd be interested to know (as I mentioned in the OP), that the question "how do I extract text from a PDF" comes up a lot, and that the standard answer is always CAM::PDF.

After your response, it seems that there is no Perl module for reading/rendering PDFs, and that about the only reliable OOS way to do it is via pdftotext from either Xpdf or Poppler.

Clint