extract

Reads a PDF page back: the text on it, with where each piece of it sits, and the images it places.

text, err := extract.Text(doc, 1)     // the page as words, lines put back together
runs, err := extract.Runs(doc, 1)     // every piece, with its place and its size
imgs, err := extract.Images(doc, 1)   // every picture, and where it lands

Pure Go, no C. It builds for GOOS=js/wasm and every architecture the fleet targets.

What a page actually holds

Not text. A page holds instructions for drawing glyphs, and the text is what those glyphs were meant to say — which the document says only if it was asked to. Where it does not, this says so rather than guessing: a run whose codes could not be worked out comes back marked Unreadable, so a caller can tell this page says nothing from this page could not be read.

Three things are tried, in order:

1. the font's /ToUnicode map, which is the document's own word on what its text says;
2. the name its encoding gives the code — but only a name the document chose itself, since a symbolic font read through an assumed encoding gives the wrong letter with nothing to say so;
3. what the embedded font program calls the code, read with go-opentype — which is the honest answer for a symbolic font, and the reason a page of mathematics comes back as mathematics.

Text drawn in the mode that puts no ink on the page — how a scanner writes what it read underneath the picture it read it from — is returned and marked Invisible.

Images

A picture comes back as the file holds it, with the box it covers on the page. A JPEG comes out as a JPEG: re-encoding it would lose something for nothing. Turning the other kinds into pixels means reading their colour space, which is render's work rather than this package's.

How it is checked

100% of statements, including every branch that handles a page saying something it should not.

Then on the corpus — 118 833 real PDFs, 121 946 pages:

pages read         121946
  with text        94865 (77.8%)
  saying nothing   27081, of which 4812 did draw glyphs
characters         33976414 (17272226 of them letters)
runs               10797045
  unreadable       203607 (1.89%)
  invisible        29917
images             300685
panics             0

The 22% of pages that say nothing are figures — this corpus is arXiv's, and most of it is plots. Of the pages that did draw glyphs and still said nothing, nearly all are Type 3 fonts with no /ToUnicode: dvips bitmap fonts whose glyphs are called a1 and s32, which no reader can turn back into letters.

The rest of the family

reader reads and writes the format · ops is the verbs and the pdfops command · render turns a page into pixels · pdffont is what a document says about a font · extract reads a page back · coedit is a PDF several people edit at once · app is the browser workbench.

Documentation for all of it: https://go-pdfkit.github.io/docs/

Licence

BSD-3-Clause.