extractors

Re-usable wrapper scripts for text document extractors. Principally, this supports the following operations:

• Use pdfminer to extract text from text-based PDF files; uses libtesseract (i.e. in-process tesseract) to extract text from images in image-only PDF pages.
• Call on soffice (i.e. libreoffice) to convert other text document formats to PDF.
• Call on imagemagick to convert images to PDF upon request.

Example

from extractors import extract_pdf, document_to_pdf, image_to_pdf, extract_image

# Unholy, make PDF from various office formats (doc, OO):
pdf_path = document_to_pdf('/path/to/a_word_document.docx')
# Unholy II, make PDF from various image fromats (png, jpg):
pdf_path = image_to_pdf('/path/to/an_image.png')

# or, do OCR:
text = extract_image('/path/to/an_image.png', languages=['en'])

# Chooses the best PDF extraction method (image or text):
data = extract_pdf('/path/to/my.pdf')
for page in data['pages']:
    print page

Installation

The package is available on the Python cheese shop:

$ pip install extractors

extractors depends heavily upon external applications, which must be installed. Install the equivalents of the following Ubuntu/Debian packages, depending on your use case:

Image and PDF text recognition (tesseract)

The following packages are required: tesseract-ocr, tesseract-ocr-osd, libtesseract-dev, tesseract-ocr-eng (and any other language training data needed).

Important: for OCR to work, the TESSDATA_PREFIX environment variable needs to be set and point at the directory containing tessdata/ (i.e. the tesseract training files).

If the environment variable EXTRACTORS_CACHE_DIR is set, content-addressed caches of all converted image files will be stored there to accelerate repeated operations.

Document to PDF conversion

The following packages are required: libreoffice, default-jdk.

Image to PDF conversion

The following packages are required: imagemagick-common, imagemagick

After these have been installed, the paths to the binaries can be configured using the following environment variables: SOFFICE_BIN and CONVERT_BIN.