Awesome
pdf-extract
A tool and library that can extract various areas of text from a PDF, especially a scholarly article PDF. It performs structural analysis to determine column bounds, headers, footers, sections, titles and so on. It can analyse and categorise sections into reference and non-reference sections and can split reference sections into individual references.
The latest version is 0.1.1. Earlier versions are far less reliable.
pdf-extract requires Ruby 1.9.1 or above.
Quick start
Install the latest version with:
$ gem install pdf-extract
Quick examples
Extract references from a PDF:
$ pdf-extract extract --references myfile.pdf
Extract references and a title from a PDF:
$ pdf-extract extract --references --titles myfile.pdf
Mark the locations of headers, footers and columns in a new PDF:
$ pdf-extract mark --columns --headers --footers myfile.pdf
Extract regions of text from a PDF, preserving line information (offsets from region origin):
$ pdf-extract extract --regions myfile.pdf
Extract regions of text from a PDF without line information (prettier and easier to read):
$ pdf-extract extract --regions --no-lines myfile.pdf
Resolve references to DOIs and output related metadata as BibTeX:
$ pdf-extract extract-bib --resolved_references myfile.pdf
Problems
pdf-extract mistakes normal text for references when attempting to extract references.
pdf-extract attempts to identify reference sections by comparing section features to
an idealised model of a reference section. Sometimes this can go wrong. If pdf-extract
is producing reference output that clearly includes something that is not a reference, try
reducing the reference_flex
slightly:
$ pdf-extract extract --references --set reference_flex:0.18 myfile.pdf
The default for reference_flex
is 0.2. Make small decrements.
pdf-extract extracts no references.
As above, but try to increase the reference_flex a bit a time:
$ pdf-extract extract --references --set reference_flex:0.25 myfile.pdf
Keep trying with small increments to reference_flex. Note that a reference_flex of 1 means pdf-extract will identify all sections as reference sections.
pdf-extract is still producing weird output after fiddling with reference_flex.
Have a look at pdf-extract's settings:
$ pdf-extract settings
This command will produce a list of settings along with descriptions of what they affect.
They can be set by passing a --set key:value
argument to pdf-extract.