Extracting PDF content
In Chapter 1, New Missions – New Tools, we installed PDF Miner 3K to parse PDF files. It's time to see how this tool works. Here's the link to the documentation for this package: http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/index.html. This link is not obvious from the PyPI page, or from the BitBucket site that contains the software. An agent who scans the docs/index.html will see this reference.
In order to see how we use this package, visit http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/programming.html. This has an important diagram that shows how the various classes interact to represent the complex internal details of a PDF document. For some helpful insight, visit http://denis.papathanasiou.org/2010/08/04/extracting-text-images-from-pdf-files/.
A PDF document is a sequence of physical pages. Each page has boxes of text (in addition to images and line graphics). Each textbox contains lines of text and each line contains the individual characters. Each of these...
