PDFBOX is not giving right output - pdfbox

Question

I am parsing a pdf in PDFBox to extract all the text from it
public static void main(String args[]) {
PDFTextStripper pdfStripper = null;
PDDocument pdDoc = null;
COSDocument cosDoc = null;
File file = new File("C:\\Users\\admin\\Downloads\\Airtel.pdf");
try {
PDFParser parser = new PDFParser(new FileInputStream(file));
parser.parse();
cosDoc = parser.getDocument();
pdfStripper = new PDFTextStripper();
pdDoc = new PDDocument(cosDoc);
pdfStripper.setStartPage(1);
pdfStripper.setEndPage(1);
String parsedText = pdfStripper.getText(pdDoc);
System.out.println(parsedText);
} catch (IOException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
BUT its not giving any text in output
help

Answer 1

PDFBox extracts text similar to how Adobe Reader copies&pastes text.
If you open your document in Adobe Reader and press <Ctrl-A> to mark all text (you'll see that hardly anything is marked) and copy&paste it to an editor, you'll find that Adobe Reader also hardly extracts anything.
The reason why neither PDFBox nor Adobe Reader (nor any other normal text extractor) extracts the text from your document is that there virtually is no text at all in it! The "text" you see is not drawn using text drawing operations but instead is painted using by defining the outlines of each "character" as path and filling the area in that path. Thus, there is no indication to a text extractor that there even is text.
There actually are two characters of real text in your document, the '-' sign between the "Previous balance" and the "Payments" boxes and the '-' sign between the "Payments" and the "Adjustments" boxes. And even those two characters are not extracted as desired because the font does not provide the information which Unicode codepoint those characters represent.
Your virtually only chance, therefore, to extract the text content of the document is to apply OCR to the document.