Plumb a PDF for detailed information about each text character, rectangle, and line. Works best on machine-generated, rather than scanned, PDFs. Built on pdfminer and pdfminer.six.

Installation
Command Line Interface
Python Library

Installation

pip install pdfplumber

Command Line Interface

Basic Example

curl "https://cdn.rawgit.com/jsvine/pdfplumber/master/examples/background-checks.pdf" > background-checks.pdf
pdfplumber < background-checks.pdf > background-checks.csv

The output will be a CSV containing info about every character, line, and rectangle in the PDF.

Options

--format [format]: csv or json
--pages [list of pages]: A space-delimited, 1-indexed list of pages or hyphenated page ranges. E.g., 1, 11-15, which would return data for pages 1, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15.
--types [list of object types to extract]: Choices are char, anno, line, rect, image, figure. Default: char anno line rect.

Python Library

Basic Example

import pdfplumber

pdf = pdfplumber.from_path("path/to/file.pdf")

if len(pdf.chars):
    print(pdf.chars[0])

if len(pdf.rects):
    print(pdf.rects[0])

if len(pdf.lines):
    print(pdf.lines[0])

Loading a PDF

pdfplumber provides two main ways to load a PDF:

pdfplumber.load(file_like_object)
pdfplumber.from_path("path/to/file.pdf")

Both methods return an instance of the pdfplumber.PDF class.

Objects

Each instance of pdfplumber.PDF provides access to six types of PDF objects. The following properties each return a Python list of the matching objects:

.chars, each representing a single text character.
.annos, each representing a single annotation-text character.
.lines, each representing a single 1-dimensional line.
.rects, each representing a single 2-dimensional rectangle.
.images, each representing a single image.
.figures, each representing a single figure.

Object Properties

Each object is represented as a simple Python dict, with the following properties:

char / anno:
- pageid: Page ID on which this character was found.
- text: E.g., "z", or "Z" or " ".
- fontname: Name of the character's font face.
- size: Font size.
- adv: Equal to text width * the font size * scaling factor.
- upright: Whether the character is upright.
- height: Height of the character.
- width: Width of the character.
- x0: Distance of left side of character from left side of page.
- x1: Distance of right side of character from left side of page.
- y0: Distance of bottom of character from bottom of page.
- y1: Distance of top of character from bottom of page.
- top: Distance of top of character from top of page.
- doctop: Distance of top of character from top of document.
- object_type: "char" / "anno"
line:
- pageid: Page ID on which this line was found.
- height: Height of line.
- width: Width of line.
- x0: Distance of left-side extremity from left side of page.
- x1: Distance of right-side extremity from left side of page.
- y0: Distance of bottom extremity from bottom of page.
- y1: Distance of top extremity bottom of page.
- top: Distance of top of line from top of page.
- doctop: Distance of top of line from top of document.
- linewidth: Thickness of line.
- object_type: "line"
rect:
- pageid: Page ID on which this rectangle was found.
- height: Height of rectangle.
- width: Width of rectangle.
- x0: Distance of left side of rectangle from left side of page.
- x1: Distance of right side of rectangle from left side of page.
- y0: Distance of bottom of rectangle from bottom of page.
- y1: Distance of top of rectangle from bottom of page.
- top: Distance of top of rectangle from top of page.
- doctop: Distance of top of rectangle from top of document.
- linewidth: Thickness of line.
- object_type: "rect"
image: TK
figure: TK

Python Support

Support for Python 3 is rough around the edges and largely dependent on the progress of pdfminer.six.

Feedback

Issues and pull requests welcome.