Perl PDF Line por Line Parser?

Question

Eu tenho um PDF, consiste apenas de texto, sem caracteres especiais nem imagens etc. Existe algum módulo Perl lá fora (estive olhando para CPAN sem sucesso) para me ajudar a analisar cada linha de página por linha? (Convertendo o PDF para o texto produz resultados ruins e dados sem poupamos)

Obrigado,

Answer 1

When I want to extract text from a PDF, I feed it to pdftohtml (part of Poppler) using the -xml output option. This produces an XML file which I parse using XML::Twig (or any other XML parser you like except XML::Simple).

The XML format is fairly simple. You get a <page> element for each page in the PDF, which contains <fontspec> elements describing the fonts used and a <text> element for each line of text. The <text> elements may contain <b> and <i> tags for bold and italic text (which is why XML::Simple can't parse it properly).

You do need to use the top and left attributes of the <text> tags to get them in the right order, because they aren't necessarily emitted in top-to-bottom order. The coordinate system has 0,0 in the upper left corner of the page with down and right being positive. Dimensions are in PostScript points (72 points per inch).