README

This package provides a class to extract text from a pdf.

use Spatie\PdfToText\Pdf;

echo Pdf::getText('book.pdf'); //returns the text from the pdf

Spatie is a webdesign agency based in Antwerp, Belgium. You'll find an overview of all our open source projects on our website.

Support us

We invest a lot of resources into creating best in class open source packages. You can support us by buying one of our paid products.

We highly appreciate you sending us a postcard from your hometown, mentioning which of our package(s) you are using. You'll find our address on our contact page. We publish all received postcards on our virtual postcard wall.

Requirements

Behind the scenes this package leverages pdftotext. You can verify if the binary installed on your system by issueing this command:

which pdftotext

If it is installed it will return the path to the binary.

To install the binary you can use this command on Ubuntu or Debian:

apt-get install poppler-utils

On a mac you can install the binary using brew

brew install poppler

If you're on RedHat, CentOS, Rocky Linux or Fedora use this:

yum install poppler-utils

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require spatie/pdf-to-text

Usage

Extracting text from a pdf is easy.

$text = (new Pdf())
    ->setPdf('book.pdf')
    ->text();

Or easier:

echo Pdf::getText('book.pdf');

By default the package will assume that the pdftotext command is located at /usr/bin/pdftotext. If it is located elsewhere pass its binary path to constructor

$text = (new Pdf('/custom/path/to/pdftotext'))
    ->setPdf('book.pdf')
    ->text();

or as the second parameter to the getText static method:

echo Pdf::getText('book.pdf', '/custom/path/to/pdftotext');

Sometimes you may want to use pdftotext options. To do so you can set them up using the setOptions method.

$text = (new Pdf())
    ->setPdf('table.pdf')
    ->setOptions(['layout', 'r 96'])
    ->text()
;

or as the third parameter to the getText static method:

echo Pdf::getText('book.pdf', null, ['layout', 'opw myP1$$Word']);

Please note that successive calls to setOptions() will overwrite options passed in during previous calls.

If you need to make multiple calls to add options (for example if you need to pass in default options when creating the Pdf object from a container, and then add context-specific options elsewhere), you can use the addOptions() method:

$text = (new Pdf())
    ->setPdf('table.pdf')
    ->setOptions(['layout', 'r 96'])
    ->addOptions(['f 1'])
    ->text()
;

Change log

Please see CHANGELOG for more information about what has changed recently.

Testing

 composer test

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security

If you've found a bug regarding security please mail security@spatie.be instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

About Spatie