pdftojson
using XPDF, pdftojson extracts text from PDF files as JSON, including word bounding boxes.
Compile
./configure
make
On MacOS, you might need to specify libpng and libfreetype locations, e.g.
./configure --with-libpng-library=/usr/local/Cellar/libpng/1.6.16/lib/ --with-libpng-includes=/usr/local/Cellar/libpng/1.6.16/include/ --with-freetype2-library=/usr/local/lib/ --with-freetype2-includes=/usr/local/include/freetype2/
You will find pdftojson inside the directory xpdf/pdftojson
Usage
pdftojson <input.pdf> <output.json>
File format
The JSON produced looks like:
[
{ "pages":14,
"number":1,
"width":612,
"height":792,
"text":[
[115,162,41,14,0,"What "],
...
]
},
{ "pages":14,
"number":2,
"width":612,
"height":792,
"text":[
[115,162,41,14,0,"Here "],
...
]
},
...
];
For each page, the text array contains: [top,left,width,height,0,text]