pdftojson

using XPDF, pdftojson extracts text from PDF files as JSON, including word bounding boxes.

Compile

./configure
make

On MacOS, you might need to specify libpng and libfreetype locations, e.g.

./configure --with-libpng-library=/usr/local/Cellar/libpng/1.6.16/lib/  --with-libpng-includes=/usr/local/Cellar/libpng/1.6.16/include/ --with-freetype2-library=/usr/local/lib/ --with-freetype2-includes=/usr/local/include/freetype2/

You will find pdftojson inside the directory xpdf/pdftojson

Usage

pdftojson <input.pdf> <output.json>

File format

The JSON produced looks like: [ { "pages":14, "number":1, "width":612, "height":792, "text":[ [115,162,41,14,0,"What "], ... ] }, { "pages":14, "number":2, "width":612, "height":792, "text":[ [115,162,41,14,0,"Here "], ... ] }, ... ];

For each page, the text array contains: [top,left,width,height,0,text]