How to extract text coordinates from PDF using Python

How to Extract Text Coordinates from a PDF Using Python

In our daily work and studies, we often need to extract text from PDF documents. However, sometimes we need more than just the text content; we also need the coordinates of the text on the PDF page. This is crucial for further processing of PDF documents. This article will introduce how to extract text coordinates from a PDF using Python.

Why Extract Text Coordinates from a PDF

In real-world work, PDF documents are often used in many scenarios, such as data mining, text analysis, and natural language processing. In these scenarios, we often need to analyze and process the text in PDF documents.

To gain a deeper understanding of the structure and content of a PDF document, we sometimes need to obtain the specific coordinates of text on a PDF page. For example, when performing keyword searches, text location, or text recognition, knowing the coordinates of text is crucial. Therefore, extracting the coordinates of text in PDFs can help us better process and analyze PDF documents, improving work efficiency.

Extracting Text Coordinates in PDFs Using Python

In Python, we can use several libraries to extract text coordinates from PDF documents. Two commonly used libraries are described below: PyMuPDF and PdfMiner.

PyMuPDF

PyMuPDF is a powerful PDF processing library in Python that can be used to open, parse, and process PDF documents. We can use PyMuPDF to extract the coordinates of text in PDF documents.

First, we need to install the PyMuPDF library. PyMuPDF can be installed using the following command:

pip install pymupdf

Next, let’s look at an example code snippet using PyMuPDF to extract text coordinates from a PDF document:

import fitz

# Open the PDF file
pdf_path = ‘example.pdf’
pdf_document = fitz.open(pdf_path)

# Get the number of pages in the PDF
total_pages = pdf_document.page_count

# Iterate over each page and extract text coordinates
for i in range(total_pages):
page = pdf_document[i]
text_instances = page.search_for(‘Text to search for’)

for instance in text_instances:
print(f’Text: {inst.text}, coordinates: {inst}’)

The example code above first opens a PDF document using PyMuPDF, then iterates through each page, searches for the specified text within each page, and outputs its coordinate information. This way, we can easily extract the coordinate information of text within a PDF document.

PdfMiner

PdfMiner is another commonly used Python library for extracting text from PDF documents. We can also use PdfMiner to extract text coordinate information from PDFs.

First, we need to install the PdfMiner library. You can install PdfMiner using the following command:

pip install pdfminer.six

Next, let’s look at an example code snippet using PdfMiner to extract the coordinates of text in a PDF document:

from pdfminer.high_level import extract_text

# Read a PDF document and extract the text content
text = extract_text('example.pdf')

# Print the text information from the PDF document
print(text)

The example code above uses the PdfMiner library to extract the text content from a PDF document, but does not extract the specific coordinate information. If you need to obtain the coordinate information, you can combine PdfMiner with other libraries. The PdfMiner library provides some low-level APIs to help you further process the content of the PDF document.

Summary

This article introduced how to use Python to extract text coordinate information from PDF documents. By using the PyMuPDF and PdfMiner libraries, we can easily obtain the coordinate information of text on PDFs, helping us better process and analyze PDF documents.