pdf2xml

Note: further developments now takes place in the repository pdfalto which aims at extending and improving the original pdf2xml.

This is a modified version of pdf2xml available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdf2xml developed by XRCE (Hervé Déjean, Sophie Andrieu, Jean-Yves Vion-Dury, Emmanuel Giguet).

The latest stable release is version 2.0.

version 2.1 (development)

• Adding CMake Build

• more to come!

Compilation

See the file INSTALL for more details.

Linux

• Install libxml2 (development headers). See http://xmlsoft.org/

• Install libmotif-dev (development headers)

• Xpdf is shipped as git submodule, to download it:

git submodule update --init --recursive

• To build:

cmake .

make

Windows

See Compilation for version 2.0 (at the moment nothing has changed)

version 2.0 (stable)

This following modifications have been made:

• encode URI (using xmlURIEscape from libxml2) for the @href attribute content to avoid blocking XML wellformedness issues. From our experiments, this problem happens in average for 2-3 scholar PDF out of one thousand.

• output coordinates attributes for the BLOCK elements when the -block option is selected,

• add a parameter -readingOrder which re-order the blocks following the reading order when the -block option is selected. By default in pdf2xml, the elements follow the PDF content stream (the so-called raw order). In pdf2txt from xpdf, several text flow orders are available including the raw order and the reading order. Note that, with this modification and this new option, only the blocks are re-ordered.

From our experiments, the raw order can diverge quite significantly from the order of elements according to the visual/reading layout in 2-4% of scholar PDF (e.g. title element is introduced at the end of the page element, while visually present at the top of the page), and minor changes can be present in up to 100% of PDF for some scientific publishers (e.g. headnote introduced at the end of the page content). This additional mode can be thus quite useful for information/structure extraction applications exploiting pdf2xml output.

• use the latest version of xpdf, version 3.04.

Compilation

See the file INSTALL for more details.

Linux

• Install libxml2 (development headers). See http://xmlsoft.org/

• Install libmotif-dev (development headers)

• Download xpdf. See http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

• The makefile has been adapted to work with the following directory format (iconv, libxml2 and dirent root dirs should be at the same level of pdf2xml's sources):

drwxr-xr-x 1 lfoppiano 197121 0 ago  1 10:44 pdf2xml/ (<- pdf2xml source)
drwxr-xr-x 1 lfoppiano 197121 0 lug 28 09:06 xpdf-3.04/

• Compile xpdf (see the file INSTALL in their source directory), then create libxpdf.a in xpdf-XX/xpdf/ with

ar -rc libxpdf.a *.o

• Compile the zlib and png libraries, under subdirectory /images:

make -f <MAKEFILE> (MAKEFILE being make.bat or make.linux64)

• Update Makefile.linux (paths to xpdf)

For Linux 32 bits:

make -f Makefile.linux

Use Makefile.linux64 for last version on Linux 64bits

make -f Makefile.linux64

This should build the executable:

exe/pdftoxml.exe

Windows

*NOTE: this version seems to have some problems with certain pdf, we recommend you to use the version built using cygwin (same process as Linux).

If you feel like discovering the issue, we would much appreciate it ;-)*

This guide compile pdf2xml using the native libraries of Windows:

• Install the Visual Studio Community edition and the tools to build C/C++ applications under windows. To verify make sure the command cl.exe and lib.exe are found.

• Download iconv from https://sourceforge.net/projects/gettext/files/libiconv-win32/1.9.1/

• Download libxml2 from ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/win32/

• Download the library dirent from https://github.com/tronkko/dirent

• Download xpdf from http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

• The makefile has been adapted to work with the following directory format (iconv, libxml2 and dirent root dirs should be at the same level of pdf2xml's sources):

drwxr-xr-x 1 lfoppiano 197121 0 lug 28 17:41 dirent/
drwxr-xr-x 1 lfoppiano 197121 0 ago  1 10:38 libiconv-1.9.1/
drwxr-xr-x 1 lfoppiano 197121 0 lug 30 20:02 libxml2-2.7.8.win32/
drwxr-xr-x 1 lfoppiano 197121 0 ago  1 10:44 pdf2xml/ (<- pdf2xml source)
drwxr-xr-x 1 lfoppiano 197121 0 lug 28 09:06 xpdf-3.04/

• Build xpdf using the windows ms_make.bat.

• create libxpdf.a in xpdf-XX/xpdf/ with

lib /out:libxpdf.lib *.obj

• Compile the zlib and png libraries, under the /images subdirectory in pdf2xml source:

make.bat

Contributor

This pdf2xml version has been modified by Patrice Lopez ([email protected]).

The first windows version (1.0.0) has been built by @pboumenot and ported on windows 7 for 64 bit.

The version 2.0 for windows (native and cygwin) was built by @lfoppiano and @flydutch.

License

As the original pdf2xml, GPL2.

Original readme

====

pdftoxml

version 1.0.0 July 2007

The Xpdf software and documentation are copyright 1996-2007 Glyph & Cog, LLC.

Email: [email protected] WWW: http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

The PDF data structures, operators, and specification are copyright 1985-2006 Adobe Systems Inc.

The libxml2 software and documentation are released under the MIT License. See the Copyright file in the distribution for the precise wording.

What is pdftoxml?

pdftoxml is an open source PDF to XML convertor.
pdftoxml runs under Linux and on Win32 systems.

pdftoxml is based on xpdf and is essentially a (large) modification of pdftotext in order to generate XML instead of plain text. The XML generation uses the libxml2 library

Distribution

pdftoxml is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2.

Compatibility

pdftoxml is developed and tested on a Linux 2.4 x86 system. In addition, it has been compiled on a Win32 system.

Getting pdftoxml

The latest version is available from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pdf2xml Source code is available from: http://pdf2xml.cvs.sourceforge.net/pdf2xml/

Running pdftoxml

To run pdftoxml, simply type:

pdftoxml.exe file.pdf

Command line options and many other details are(should be) described in sourceforge

Compiling pdftoxml

See the separate file, INSTALL.

Contributors

Hervé Déjean (src) Sophie Andrieu (src) Jean-Yves Vion-Dury (schemas)