Extract text from imported (PDF / Word / Office) files

[joepio]

Being able to search inside the PDF files uploaded to Atomic Server would be a really nice addition.

Goals:

• Make it easier to find PDF documents by searching for terms that occur inside them
• Lightweight
• Fast
• Runs in background, may fail. Should not slow down upload process.
• OCR, if missing in the original PDF, would be a decent addition. But only if other goals are met.
• Bonus points if it also turns other doc types (e.g. docx) to plaintext
• Output should be plaintext or (preferably) markdown

Non-goals:

• Extract data from tables in PDFs

There are some tools that could help with this:

• pdf-extract rust crate
• ooxml-rs openXML (.docx .xlsx .pptx / word powerpoint excel) rust parser
• pdf-to-markdown (JS, so should run client-side!)

[AlexMikhalev]

https://crates.io/crates/pdfium-render - new contender. Recently recommended in rust reddit.