I'm trying to extract text from PDF files using the Google Cloud Vision API. It works most of the times, but I get gibberish in a few cases. I tried both DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION and TEXT_DETECTION, I tried forcing the language in the languageHints but it didn't help.
Then I tried with a screenshot saved as tiff and this did work, so I'm guessing that Google tries to use the text in the PDF if it's not just a picture. Indeed, when I select all "text" in the PDF, I get gibberish.
When I print the tiff back into PDF, text extraction works. So it's really something weird with the PDF. But other extraction software (such as abbyy) work well with the original PDF.
Has anyone had the same kind of issues?
One thing that could help would be an option to force treat the PDF as an "image PDF". Is there such an option?
Thanks for your help!
FYI, I am unfortunately not allowed to show the PDF, and I use the dotnet library.
Edit:
The info on the PDF is:
Creator: "PScript5.dll Version 5.2.2"
Producer: Acrobat Distiller 10.1.16 (Windows)
Related
I am looking for the method (of Word ole-object) which can open pdf in the Microsoft Word.
I want to copy all pages of pdf into doc/docx and add there footers.
Could anybody give the cue how to import pdf?
PS: any sample code for this problem would be great.
Thanks,
Lilya
You need OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine for converting PDF to document. PDF is generic format and it can include text as image. So it is very hard to convert PDF to document. SAP hasn't got any OCR function for doing this. Maybe OpenText (if customer using it) has this functionality, I haven't got detail information about opentext. You need third party tools for this. You can use online services or command line utilities to converting PDF files to text files easelly if PDF included text, otherwise you need professional SDKs (for example Abbyy Finereader) for doing this.
I used FoxIT PDF Reader to save the PDF file into text file and make a macro to read the text file. Of course, by doing so, you can only get the text, but nothing else.
I have access to a scanner at my library which can create "searchable PDFs." These are PDFs that show the exact image of a scanned document, but there is a kind of hidden text in the PDF that can be selected when you try to select a portion of the image that contains text. In this way you can copy and paste text or search for text in the scanned document. This is VERY useful. It's an awesome improvement over raw scanned images. I also have several apps on my mac that can create this kind of searchable PDF from a scanned document or a raw image.
Now it's obvious from any who has ever used OCR that the process of converting images to text is not 100% accurate, so the text that you search or copy will not be correct in some places.
So I search for quite some time to find an application that would load a searchable PDF and allow me to repair the hidden searchable text without reformatting or modifying the original scanned image.
Does anyone know of a tool (or library API) that would allow this?
It's worth saying here that I tried the latest version of Adobe Acrobat DC for Mac, and it doesn't seem to even allow me to view the hidden searchable text, much less edit it. It does allow me to replace scanned image with the results of it's own OCR process so that I could edit and save the document. But this would produce horrible results for any of the scanned documents that I am using. It seems designed for editing a "native PDF" not editing a scanned document.
I have also tried ABBYY FineReader with no luck.
i'm using ABBYY FineReader 12 Professional. (not open source)
Just open a scanned image or scanned pdf and press Verify Text(or Ctrl + F7), than you go over all the spelling errors or low-confidence charachters and fix them.
The program is very good, it shows you the exact place in image/pdf to correct and the OCR guessing side by side for convenience. It iterates all of them.
[By the way, I'm using the shortcuts to speed up things:
Alt+Enter to add the unrecognized word to dictionary.
Ctrl+Delete to skip word or confirm in case you fixed it.]
Than save the document as a pdf file Menu:File>Save Document As> PDF File, and you can search it on every pdf reader. The saved file look the same as the scanned one, but 'behind' it there text.
It's weird you tried ABBYY with no luck... it's working great for me. maybe you tried not the Professional version.
Hope it helps you.
It is not creating a searchable pdf from images the poster is after, he wants to start with an already searchable pdf and modify its text (e.g. because intially a searchable pdf was made but later an overlooked error in recognition was found and needs correction). I see no way and no tool that assists in doing this.
Can someone suggest the best way to convert a PDF file to WMF?
I currently make Dynamic XML Form PDFs with Adobe LiveCycle Designer, but a client requires the file in WMF format for printing. Instead of filling out the form directly, they have their users answer the questions within their own UI, then print the fields to the form.
I've tried converting the PDF to PNG within Acrobat then converting it to WMF, but our client is having issues with them indicating these WMFs "appear to be graphics renamed as WMFs".
Thanks
Try writing a script that prints your PDF files into a WMF/EMF virtual printer.
There a few out there, for example:
EMF Printer (GPL, not free for commercial use).
Amyuni EMF Printer Freeware, but a bit outdated (Disclaimer: I work for Amyuni Technologies).
I believe there is another one (as source code) in the Windows Driver Kit source code samples, but I cannot find the link now.
We are using Tesseract's Java library, Called Tess4j to convert PDF files to text.
It works nicely with Tiff files as well as one page PDF files. But with multi-page PDF's it does generate the output file, when it comes to the last page, the control doesn't seem to come back to the original application which invoked the doOCR call. It just stays/hangs there without doing anything.
Is it an issue with the native call not returning back.i have no clue,
Please let me know if there is a solution to this issue, as soon as possible.
Regards
Vish
Tess4J does support multi-page PDF and multi-page TIFF. Substitute with your PDF file in the unit test case and give it a try.
I have an issue printing pdf file in applet. I got input from http and the stream is consutructed using the pdfstamper. The problem is that i want to send the resulted stream to printer, but i did not find how to do that.
UNless the printer supports PDF you cannot send it directly to the printer. You need to rasterize it. I wrote a blog article on printing PDFs from Java at http://www.jpedal.org/PDFblog/2010/01/printing-pdf-files-from-java/
PDFBox might manage it. I'm not aware of any other Java-specific PDF renderers out there, though I wouldn't be shocked to find there's a couple more out there.
Basically, any app that can convert a PDF to an image can probably act as a print driver.
GhostScript perhaps?