PDFBOX, Reading a pdf line by line and extracting text properties - pdfbox

Question

I am using pdfbox to extract text from pdf files. I read the pdf document as follows
PDFParser parser = null;
String text = "";
PDFTextStripper stripper = null;
PDDocument pdoc = null;
COSDocument cdoc = null;
File file = new File("path");
try {
parser = new PDFParser(new FileInputStream(file));
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
try {
parser.parse();
cdoc = parser.getDocument();
stripper = new PDFTextStripper();
pdoc = new PDDocument(cdoc);
stripper.setStartPage(1);
stripper.setEndPage(2);
text = stripper.getText(pdoc);
System.out.println(text);
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
But what I want to do is read the document line by line and to extract the text properties such as bold,italic, from each line.
How can I achieve this with pdfbox library

Answer 1

extract the text properties such as bold,italic, from each line. How can I achieve this with pdfbox library
Properties such as bold and italic are not first-class properties in a PDF.
Bold or italic writing in PDFs is achieved either using
different fonts (which is the better way); in this case one can try to determine whether or not the fonts are bold or italic by
looking at the font name: it may contain a substring "bold", "italic", "oblique"...
looking at some optional properties of the font, e.g. font weight...
inspecting embedded font file.
Neither of these methods is fool-proof; or
using the same font as for non-bold, non-italic text but using special techniques to make them appear bold or italic (aka poor man's bold), e.g.
not only filling the glyph contours but also drawing a thicker line along it for a bold impression,
drawing the glyph twice, the second time slightly displaced, also for a bold impression,
using a text or transformation matrix to slant the letters for an italic impression.
By overriding the PDFTextStripper methods with such tests accordingly, you may achieve a fairly good guess rate for styles during PDF text extraction.