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Is there a way to automate tabular data extraction from a number of pdf files?
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Paul Rayman  
#1 Posted : Tuesday, January 5, 2016 3:54:30 AM(UTC)
Paul Rayman

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Question:
Is there a way to automate tabular data extraction from a number of pdf files?
Regularly I have to go through a list of pdf files and search for specific data and add them to an excel sheet for later review.
The pdf files I work with are tabular and have similar structures.

Answer:
The problem is that PDF in general is not a structured file format. It doesn't have information about columns, paragraphs, tables, sentences or even words. Basically it cares only about characters on a page in specific locations.
This means that generally you cannot query a PDF document and extract text for every cell in a table. But you can ask a library to get all of the text in a specific location.
So, if you can determine coordinates of the cells in a document and they are same from file to file, then you can extract the text using the following technique:

Code:

public void ExtractTabularText()
{
    //Initialize the SDK library
    //You have to call this function before you can call any PDF processing functions.
    PdfCommon.Initialize();

    //Open and load a PDF document from a file.
    using (var doc = PdfDocument.Load(@"c:\test001.pdf"))
    {
        foreach (var page in doc.Pages)
        {
            //Specify the cell coordinate in page coordinate system
            var rect = new FS_RECTF() { left = 45.0f, right = 55.0f, top = 245.0f, bottom = 137.0f };
            //Extract text within a rectangular boundary on the page specified by a FS_RECTF structure
            string cellText = page.Text.GetBoundedText(rect);
        }
    }

    //Release all resources allocated by the SDK library
    PdfCommon.Release();
}
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