SoFunction
Updated on 2025-04-14

One article explores the use of PDFMiner, a powerful PDF parsing tool in Python

1. Background introduction: Why choose PDFMiner

In the digital age, PDF files have become the standard format for document exchange due to their portability and wide compatibility. However, extracting useful information from PDFs has always been a challenge. The PDFMiner library came into being to solve this problem specifically. It not only extracts text, but also obtains font information, page layout, tables, pictures, and document metadata.

2. What is PDFMiner

PDFMiner is a powerful Python library for parsing PDF documents and extracting text content and data. It supports text extraction, font information acquisition, page layout analysis, table analysis, image extraction, and document metadata acquisition.

3. How to install PDFMiner

Installing PDFMiner is very simple, just enter the following command in the command line:

pip install 

This command will install the Python 3 version of PDFMiner, which is compatible with Python 2 and Python 3.

4. Simple library function usage method

4.1 Extract text

from pdfminer.high_level import extract_text
text = extract_text("")
print(text)

This code uses the extract_text function to extract all text from the PDF file.

4.2 Obtain page layout information

from  import LAParams, LTTextBox, LTTextLine
from  import PDFPage
from  import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from  import PDFPageAggregator

resource_manager = PDFResourceManager()
fake_file_handle = ()
converter = PDFPageAggregator(resource_manager, fake_file_handle, laparams=LAParams())
page_interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(resource_manager, converter)

with open("", "rb") as pdf_file:
    for page in PDFPage.get_pages(pdf_file):
        page_interpreter.process_page(page)
        layout = converter.get_result()
        for lt_obj in layout:
            if isinstance(lt_obj, (LTTextBox, LTTextLine)):
                text = lt_obj.get_text()
                x, y, width, height = lt_obj.bbox
                font = lt_obj._objs[0].fontname
                font_size = lt_obj._objs[0].size
                print(f"Text: {()}, Position: ({x:.2f}, {y:.2f}), Font: {font}, Size: {font_size:.2f}")

This code takes information such as the location, font and font size of the text block and prints it out.

4.3 Extract table data

from pdfminer.high_level import extract_text
import tabula

table_text = extract_text("table_example.pdf")
print(table_text)

tables = tabula.read_pdf("table_example.pdf", pages="all")
for df in tables:
    print(df)

This code uses PDFMiner to extract tables in PDF documents and uses tabula to extract table data.

4.4 Extract images

from  import PDFParser
from  import PDFDocument
from  import PDFStream
import io
from PIL import Image

with open('', 'rb') as file:
    parser = PDFParser(file)
    document = PDFDocument(parser)
    if document.is_extractable:
        for xref in :
            if xref.get_subtype() == '/Image':
                stream_obj = xref.get_object()
                if isinstance(stream_obj, PDFStream):
                    data = stream_obj.get_rawdata()
                    image = ((data))
                    ()

This code extracts images from PDF documents.

5. Application scenario example

5.1 Text data extraction

Extract text content from a large number of PDF documents for text mining, natural language processing, or search.

5.2 Data conversion

Convert tabular data from PDF documents into structured data for further analysis or import into the database.

5.3 Metadata Extraction

Get metadata information of PDF documents, such as author, title, creation date, for document management or classification.

6. Common bugs and solutions

6.1 Environment configuration issues

Error message: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pdfminer'

Solution: Make sure to install PDFMiner with the correct commands, pip install.

6.2 Inaccurate text extraction location

Error message: The location information is inaccurate or lost after text extraction.

Solution: Adjust LAParams parameters to optimize the accuracy of layout analysis.

6.3 Garbage code caused by encoding problems

Error message: Non-ASCII characters are displayed as garbled.

Solution: Specify the correct encoding, for example using the codec='utf-8' parameter.

7. Summary

PDFMiner is a powerful tool for parsing and extracting text content and data from PDF documents. Whether it is text analysis, data extraction or automated processing, PDFMiner can meet the needs. I hope this article can help you better understand the basic concepts and usage methods of PDFMiner so that you can make full use of this library in your actual work.

This is the article about exploring the use of PDFMiner in Python. For more related Python PDFMiner content, please search for my previous articles or continue browsing the following related articles. I hope everyone will support me in the future!