I am trying different python libraries like pdftotree, pdfminer, tabula etc. But could not get the exact results. I mean I can get text from PDF, Images and Tabular data in HTML, but not as maintained and organized as original PDF file. Can someone help me with something regarding this? I would be thankful.
Mostly yes. Translate the PDF to SVG, and embed the SVG in your web page.
SVG's image model (what it can represent and how) is a near-superset of the PDF image model (which is itself a superset of PostScript), though SVG lacks some of the print-specific features of PDF. There are probably quite a few PDF->SVG converters out there already. Googling "Pdf to SVG" turned up quite a few promising hits
There will be some complications:
Many PDF files are longer than 1 page. You might need to generate 10 SVG files for a single 10 page PDF file, and then build a web page around those 10 SVGs. Throw in some dynamic HTML to "turn pages" and you've got a good web-based PDF viewer.
There are parts of PDF that aren't within its image model at all... bookmarks, annotations (form fields, digital signatures), document metadata (author, creation date, etc), and so forth. Some of the non-image-model stuff is common enough that a PDF to SVG utility might handle it directly (links), while other stuff doesn't have an HTML equivalent and would be lost.
You could preserve the appearance of a digital signature, but the actual security represented by those visuals would be gone. Preserving that signature's appearance could be considered lying about the security.
Related
I am working on a project where I have a pdf file which describes one of the health policy. What I need to do is extract the information from this PDF and try to save it in some form such that I can answer the questions related to the policy by extracting info from this PDf.
This PDF is too big, so I want to divide the PDF according to the different sections so that when a query related to some particular area comes in then I wont have to go through the entire document.
I tried solving this using some pdf converters which converts the PDFs into the HTMLs. But these converters wont convert the PDF to HTML properly so that headings will have heading tag. Also even if I convert this properly and get the proper sections out of the document, I am not getting how to store this data.(I mean in which form should I store this Data).
Is there any other solution with which I can achieve this. I am using Python and also I can use NLTK if needed. Also the format is not fixed for the PDfs, I mean to say my code should work on any kind of PDFs.
PDFMiner is great in that it has location for every bit of text it gets from the PDF. It won't be nicely put in header tags or anything like that, but if you have a consistent PDF structure in your docs you might be able to get something working.
I generate PDFs with the xhtml2pdf Python package. The output is not optimal. I use floating divs in order to place images and text on the page. In HTML this works but after PDF rendering, images and text ar placed underneath eachother which is not what I want. From surfing the web I learned that the Report Lab package that is used by xhtml2pdf can not handle floating divs. Does a workaround exist? I have tried webkit rendering via QT but the resulting PDFs are of low quality, i.e. character spacing is completely wrong.
If you cannot achieve the results you need with xhtml2pdf, I suggest you use ReportLab directly. ReportLab contains support for RML, ReportLabs own markup language that lets you easily create formatted text, and has a support library called Platypus that makes layout fairly simple using Python objects to represent document parts and page layouts.
The reason you are having problems, by the way, is that xhtml2pdf has to essentially act like a HTML rendering engine that outputs to PDF rather than the screen directly. As it took a long time and a lot of effort to make good rendering engines for browsers, so, too, does it seem that xhtml2pdf will take a lot of effort to make it of similar quality. This isn't to say that xhtml2pdf is bad, just that it's going to take time for it to be as good as rendering in a browser, and if PDF output for its own sake is what you really are interested in, I think using ReportLab directly is a better choice.
In Python, I have files generated by ReportLab. Now, i need to extract some pages from that PDF and hide confidential information.
I can create a PDF file with blacked-out spots and use pyPdf to mergePage, but people can still select and copy-paste the information under the blacked-out spots.
Is there a way to make those spots completely confidential?
Per example, I need to hide addresses on the pages, how would i do it?
Thanks,
Basically you'll have to remove the corresponding text drawing commands in the PDF's page content stream. It's much easier to generate the pages twice, once with the confidential information, once without them.
It might be possible (I don't know ReportLab enough) to specially craft the PDF in a way that the confidential information is easier accessible (e.g. as separate XObjects) for deletion. Still you'd have to do pretty low-level operations on the PDF -- which I would advise against.
(Sorry, I was not able to log on when I posted the question...)
Unfortunately, the document cannot be regenerated at will (context sensitive), and those PDF files (about 35) are 3000+ pages.
I was thinking about using pdf2ps and pdf2ps back, but there is a lot of quality.
pdf2ps -dLanguageLevel=3 input.pdf - | ps2pdf14 - output.pdf
And if i use "pdftops" instead, the text is still selectable. If there is a way to make it non-selectable like with "pdf2ps" but with better quality, it will do too.
I want to automatically generate booking confirmation PDF files in Python. Most of the content will be static (i.e. logos, booking terms, phone numbers), with a few dynamic bits (dates, costs, etc).
From the user side, the simplest way to do this would be to start with a PDF file with the static content, and then using python to just add the dynamic parts. Is this a simple process?
From doing a bit of search, it seems that I can use reportlab for creating content and pyPdf for merging PDF's together. Is this the best approach? Or is there a really funky way that I haven't come across yet?
Thanks!
From the user side, the simplest way to do this would be to start with a PDF file with the static content, and then using python to just add the dynamic parts. Is this a simple process?
Unfortunately no. There are several tools that are good at producing PDFs from scratch (most commonly for Python, ReportLab), but they don't generally load existing PDFs. You would have to include generating code for any boilerplate text, lines, blocks, shapes and images, rather than this being freely editable by the user.
On the other side there's pyPdf which can load PDFs, collate the pages, and extract some of the information, but can't really add new content. You can ‘merge’ pages into one, but you'd still have to create the extra information overlay as a page in ReportLab first.
Look into docutils and reSTructuredText. You could quickly write out your PDF document in reST and then compile the PDF using rst2pdf.py
I've used this, it creates very beautiful documents and the markup is extensible! Later you could take the same code and run it into rst2html to create a website out if it!
Take a look here:
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html
http://code.google.com/p/rst2pdf/
Good luck
You could generate a document through, for example, TeX, or OpenOffice, or whatever gives you the most comfortable bindings and then print the document with a pdf printer.
This allows you not to have to figure out where to put fields precisely or figure out what to do if your content overflows the space allocated for it.
I am using reportlab toolkit in Python to generate some reports in PDF format. I want to use some predefined parts of documents already published in PDF format to be included in generated PDF file. Is it possible (and how) to accomplish this in reportlab or in python library?
I know I can use some other tools like PDF Toolkit (pdftk) but I am looking for Python-based solution.
I'm currently using PyPDF to read, write, and combine existing PDF's and ReportLab to generate new content. Using the two package seemed to work better than any single package I was able to find.
If you want to place existing PDF pages in your Reportlab documents I recommend pdfrw. Unlike PageCatcher it is free.
I've used it for several projects where I need to add barcodes etc to existing documents and it works very well. There are a couple of examples on the project page of how to use it with Reportlab.
A couple of things to note though:
If the source PDF contains errors (due to the originating program following the PDF spec imperfectly for example), pdfrw may fail even though something like Adobe Reader has no apparent problems reading the PDF. pdfrw is currently not very fault tolerant.
Also, pdfrw works by being completely agnostic to the actual content of the PDF page you are placing. So for example, you wouldn't be able to use pdfrw inspect a page to see if it contains a certain string of text in the lower right-hand corner. However if you don't need to do anything like that you should be fine.
There is an add-on for ReportLab — PageCatcher.