Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/drmccoy/pdftextorizer

Interactively extract text from multi-column PDFs
https://github.com/drmccoy/pdftextorizer

gui pdf pdf-extractor pdf-files pdf2text pdftotext pyqt5 qt5

Last synced: 4 months ago
JSON representation

Interactively extract text from multi-column PDFs

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
PDF Textorizer README

=====================



[TOC]



PDF Textorizer is a GUI application to interactively extract text from

multi-column PDFs, licensed under the terms of the

[GNU Affero General Public License version 3](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html)

(or later), written in Python.



What does PDF Textorizer do?

----------------------------



PDF Textorizer loads PDF files and displays them, page by page. It

automatically detects columns of text in a PDF with a multi-column layout and

marks these regions on the currently displayed page.



The user can click on a region to select it. It can then be modified: the user

can move it across the page, change its size, move it up and down in the order

of regions and even delete it. Additionally, the user can add new regions by

drawing them over the current page. And to save the current progress, the whole

set of regions in PDF file can be saved into a JSON file and loaded back in

later.



Once the user is happy with the current setup, the text found in the regions

can be grabbed and exported, in order. As a quick preview, only the current

page can be either saved into a file or printed to standard out, and for the

final pass, the whole PDF can be converted.



Why?

----



PDFs with complex layouts, especially multiple columns, are notoriously

difficult to copy text from. Often, copying grabs text from neighbouring

columns and similar issues.



All that and worse can be found in tabletop roleplaying PDFs, with their

uber-complex layouts that include text flowing around images and styled

statblocks. If you want to, for example, copy flavour text for ease of

translation or having it readily available during a session, those issue

make that pretty annoying.



[PyMuPDF has example code to detect columns](https://artifex.com/blog/extract-text-from-a-multi-column-document-using-pymupdf-inpython),

and while the results are promising, they're not perfect. You really want

to fix the remaining issues before grabbing the text. And that's best

done interactively in a GUI. Hence, PDF Textorizer.



Keyboard shortcuts

------------------



PDF Textorizer offers global keyboard shortcuts for all the operations

in the main menu.



| Shortcut        | Command                   | Explanation                                                              |

| --------------- | --------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|

| Ctrl+O          | Open PDF                  | Open a new PDF file                                                      |

| Ctrl+W          | Close PDF                 | Close the currently opened PDF file                                      |

| Ctrl+Shift+O    | Load Regions              | Load a previously saved regions file                                     |

| Ctrl+Shift+S    | Save Regions As...        | Save the current regions into a new file                                 |

| Ctrl+S          | Save Regions              | Save the current regions to the current regions file                     |

| Ctrl+P          | Convert Page to Text      | Convert all regions of the current page to text and print it to stdout   |

| Ctrl+T          | Save Page to Text         | Convert all regions of the current page to text and write it into a file |

| Ctrl+Shift-T    | Save All Pages to Text    | Convert all regions of all pages to text and write it into a file        |

| Ctrl+Q          | Quit                      | Quit PDF Textorizer                                                      |

| Shift+F1        | About PDF Textorizer      | Show an about box                                                        |



Keyboard commands

-----------------



In addition to the global keyboard shortcuts advertised in the main menu,

PDF Textorizer supports a set of keyboard shortcuts for modifying regions.



NOTE: These shortcuts only work when the page view has the focus, by, for

      example, clicking on it first!



| Key Combination | Command                                      |

| --------------- | ---------------------------------------------|

| K               | Move to the first page in the PDF            |

| L               | Move to the previous page in the PDF         |

| J               | Move to the next page in the PDF             |

| H               | Move to the last in the PDF                  |

| Shift+K         | Select the first region on the page          |

| Shift+L         | Select the previous region on the page       |

| Shift+J         | Select the next region on the page           |

| Shift+H         | Select the last on the region                |

| Left            | Move the selected region left                |

| Right           | Move the selected region right               |

| Up              | Move the selected region up                  |

| Down            | Move the selected region down                |

| Shift+Left      | Grow the selected region horizontally        |

| Shift+Right     | Shrink the selected region horizontally      |

| Shift+Up        | Grow the selected region vertically          |

| Shift+Down      | Shrink the selected region vertically        |

| Page Up         | Move the selected region "up" in the stack   |

| Page Down       | Move the selected region "down" in the stack |

| Insert          | Add a new region                             |

| Delete          | Remove the selected region                   |

| R               | Redraw the selected region                   |



Installation

------------



To install PDF Textorizer system-wide, use

```

pip install .

```



To install PDF Textorizer for the current user only, use

```

pip install --user .

```



To install PDF Textorizer in a virtualenv, use

```

pip -m venv env

source env/bin/activate

pip install .

```



Optionally, the included [Makefile](Makefile) can be leveraged to install and

run PDF Textorizer from a virtualenv. Please read the [Makefile](Makefile) itself

to understand what it can do.



A typical example would be:



```

make run

```



This would install PDF Textorizer into a virtualenv and run it.



A more elaborate example:



```

PYTHON=python3 make run arg="-h"

```



This would install PDF Textorizer into a virtualenv and run using "python3" as

the Python environment, with the command line parameter "-h" (thus showing

the help text).



Command line usage

------------------



```

usage: pdftextorizer [-h] [-v] [-p PAGE] [pdf_file] [regions_file]



pdftextorizer -- Interactively extract text from multi-column PDFs



positional arguments:

  pdf_file              PDF file to open

  regions_file          Regions file to load



options:

  -h, --help            Show this help message and exit

  -v, --version         Print the version and exit



PDF arguments:

  -p PAGE, --page PAGE  Open the PDF file directly on this page

```