I have a very large PDF File (200,000 KB or more) which contains a series of pages containing nothing but tables. I'd like to somehow parse this information using Ruby, and import the resultant data into a MySQL database.
Does anyone know of any methods for pulling this data out of the PDF? The data is formatted in the following manner:
Name | Address | Cash Reported | Year Reported | Holder Name
Sometimes the Name field overflows into the address field, in which case the remaining columns are displayed on the following line.
Due to the irregular format, I've been stuck on figuring this out. At the very least, could anyone point me to a Ruby PDF library for this task?
UPDATE: I accidentally provided incorrect information! The actual size of the file is 300 MB, or 300,000 KB. I made the change above to reflect this.
I assume you can copy'n'paste text snippets without problems when your PDF is opened in Acrobat Reader or some other PDF Viewer?
Before trying to parse and extract text from such monster files programmatically (even if it's 200 MByte only -- for simple text in tables that's huuuuge, unless you have 200000 pages...), I would proceed like this:
Try to sanitize the file first by re-distilling it.
Try with different CLI tools to extract the text into a .txt file.
This is a matter of minutes. Writing a Ruby program to do this certainly is a matter of hours, days or weeks (depending on your knowledge about the PDF fileformat internals... I suspect you don't have much experience of that yet).
If "2." works, you may halfway be done already. If it works, you also know that doing it programmatically with Ruby is a job that can in principle be solved. If "2." doesn't work, you know it may be extremely hard to achieve programmatically.
Sanitize the 'Monster.pdf':
I suggest to use Ghostscript. You can also use Adobe Acrobat Distiller if you have access to it.
gswin32c.exe ^
-o Monster-PDF-sanitized ^
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
-f Monster.pdf
(I'm curious how much that single command will make your output PDF shrink if compared to the input.)
Extract text from PDF:
I suggest to first try pdftotext.exe (from the XPDF folks). There are other, a bit more inconvenient methods available too, but this might do the job already:
pdftotext.exe ^
-f 1 ^
-l 10 ^
-layout ^
-eol dos ^
-enc Latin1 ^
-nopgbrk ^
Monster-PDF-sanitized.pdf ^
first-10-pages-from-Monster-PDF-sanitized.txt
This will not extract all pages but only 1-10 (for proof of concept, to see if it works at all). To extract from every page, just leave off the -f 1 -l 10 parameter. You may need to tweak the encoding by changing the parameter to -enc ASCII7 (or UTF-8, UCS-2).
If this doesn't work the quick'n'easy way (because, as sometimes happens, some font in the original PDF uses "custom encoding vector") you should ask a new question, describing the details of your findings so far. Then you need to resort bigger calibres to shoot down the problem.
At the very least, could anyone point
me to a Ruby PDF library for this
task?
If you haven't done so, you should check out the two previous questions: "Ruby: Reading PDF files," and "ruby pdf parsing gem/library." PDF::Reader, PDF::Toolkit, and Docsplit are some of the relatively popular suggested libraries. There is even a suggestion of using JRuby and some Java PDF library parser.
I'm not sure if any of these solutions is actually suitable for your problem, especially that you are dealing with such huge PDF files. So unless someone offers a more informative answer, perhaps you should select a library or two and take them for a test drive.
This will be a difficult task, as rendered PDFs have no concept of tabular layout, just lines and text in predetermined locations. It may not be possible to determine what are rows and what are columns, but it may depend on the PDF itself.
The java libraries are the most robust, and may do more than just extract text. So I would look into JRuby and iText or PDFbox.
Check whether there is any structured content in the PDF. I wrote a blog article explaining this at http://www.jpedal.org/PDFblog/?p=410
If not, you will need to build it.
Maybe the Prawn ruby library? link text
Related
Is there a way to edit the raw text from a PDF without any special paid software?
So there are PDFs with highlightable text. I assume that the text is stored somewhere in the file.
I tried to just drag & drop a PDF into vscode but it just showed me unknown characters; even a little of meta text but if I edit the meta-infos, the file gets mostly corrupted.
Apart from that, I could not find any of the text contents of my desired PDF in vscode-editor.
Does someone know if there is a solution like inspecting and changing the source code somehow without a special software? I want to edit the contents; not the meta-infos.
(I use macOS)
The text you see on a pdf page can be constructed in dozens of different ways, actually there are millions of users, using potentially hundreds if not thousands of different methods.
Update
The question is MacOS but for native cross platform you need to work in mime text/pdf to be universally useful. But by way of example how thats possible specifically in windows its possible to write line by line using say cmd here is a snippet of what was a few dozen lines :-)
echo %%PDF-1.0>demo.pdf
echo %%µ¶µ¶>>demo.pdf
echo/>>demo.pdf
for %%Z in (demo.pdf) do set "FZ1=%%~zZ"
echo 1 0 obj>>demo.pdf
echo ^<^</Type/Catalog/Pages 2 0 R^>^>>>demo.pdf
echo endobj>>demo.pdf
echo/>>demo.pdf
For the fuller "Feature Creep"ing of now over more than a 100 lines and counting see
https://github.com/GitHubRulesOK/MyNotes/raw/master/MAKE-PDF.cmd
However although plain text could be the simplest it is rarely used except to prove a conceptual point that it is possible. The rest of the time "Special Software" as you call it (a pdf generator/editor) will be used to compress the file objects, most frequently as different optimal binary streams.
So some text may be scanned pixels whilst other text may be line shapes that look like letters, or at other times plain letters without fonts but a named style, or even letters with the font included (embedded) in the file (the preferred option).
In many ways each page may be built different to the others and thus no two pdfs generally will use the same structure unless like a bank statement using a format that does not change much from month to month, even if the balance wobbles about.
So in summary the tool that will work best is the one that covers every single permutation that Adobe dreamed of, and still keep the result a valid Adobe PDF.
Thus Acrobat PRO 3D is on my shelf (even if not used from one year to the next)
There are many cheaper editors and ones I will use more often for small mods are Tracker Xchange and FreePDF PRO and both have different limitations.
Your choices for MacOS will be more limited thus search for the best you are willing to pay for.
I already did a lot of research and realized that clear information about "How to generate PDF/A-1a" or "...convert to PDF/A-1a" is really rare. I found some information to convert to PDF/A-1a via GhostScript, but I didn't make it to get it working. So, maybe there are some necessary conditions for the data missing in the first place. Conditions like propper metadata of the PDF, structured data for readability by a screen reader, alternative text for pictures, and a declaration of the given language of the text. I need a proper working GhostScript command with the corresponding gs version and the mandatory file conditions to generate or even convert to PDF/A-1a. PDF/A-1b means nothing to me because I'm already able to convert to that.
Thanks for any help.
How could I read Garmin's .fit file on Linux. I'd like to use it for some data analysis but the file is a binary file.
I have visited http://garmin.kiesewetter.nl/ but the website does not seem to work.
Thanks
You can use GPSbabel to do this. It's a command-line tool, so you end up with something like:
gpsbabel -i garmin_fit -f {filename}.fit -o csv -F {output filename}.csv
and you'll get a text file with all the lat/long coordinates.
What's trickier is getting out other data, ie: if you want speed, time, or other information from the .fit file. You can easily get those into a .gpx, where they're in xml and human-readable, but I haven't yet found a single line solution for getting that data into a csv.
The company that created ANT made an SDK package available here:
https://www.thisisant.com/resources/fit
When unzipping this, there is a java/FitCSVTool.jar file. Then:
java -jar java/FitCSVTool.jar -b input.fit output.csv
I tested with a couple of files and it seems to work really well. Then of course the format of the csv can be a little bit complex.
For example, latitude and longitude are stored in semicircles, so it should be multiplied by 180/(2^31) to give GPS coordinates.
You need to convert the file to a .csv, the Garmin repair tool at http://garmin.kiesewetter.nl/ will do this for you. I've just loaded the site fine, try again it may have been temporarily down.
To add a little more detail:
"FIT or Flexible and Interoperable Data Transfer is a file format used for GPS tracks and routes. It is used by newer Garmin fitness GPS devices, including the Edge and Forerunner." From the OpenStreetMap Wiki http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FIT
There are many tools to convert these files to other formats for different uses, which one you choose depends on the use. GPSBabel is another converer tool that may help. gpsbabel.org (I can't post two links yet :)
This page parses the file and lets you download it as tables. https://www.fitfileviewer.com/ The fun bit is converting the timestamps from numbers to readable timestamps Garmin .fit file timestamp
I like reading the PoC||GTFO issues and one thing I found remarkable when I first discovered it, was the "polyglot" nature of their PDF files.
Let met explain: when you consider for example their 8th issue, you may unzip files from it; execute the encryption they are talking about by running it as a script and even better(worse?) with their 9th issue you can even play it as a music file!
I'm currently in the process of writing small scripts every week and writing each time a little one page PDF in LaTeX to explain the said scripts. So I would really enjoy being able to create the same kind of PDF files. Sadly they explained (partly) in their first issue how to include zip files, but they did so through three small sketches of cmd lines without actual explanations.
So my question is basically :
how can one create such a polyglot PDF file containing stuff like a zip as well as being a shell script which may be run using arguments just like normal scripts?
I'm asking here about the process of creation, not just an explanation of how this is possible. The ideal way for me would that there are already some scripts or programs allowing to create easily such PDF files.
I've tried to search the net for the keywords "polyglot files" and others of the kind and wasn't able to find any useful matches. Maybe this process has another name?
I've already read the presentation by Julia Wolf which explains how things works, but I sadly haven't had time to apply the knowledge there to real world, because I'm sadly not used to play with file headers and the way a PDF is constructed.
EDIT:
Okay, I've read more and found the 7th edition of PoC||GTFO to be really informative concerning this subject. I may end up being able to create my own scripts to do such polyglot PDF files if I have some more time to consider it.
I played around with polyglots myself after attending Ange's talks and also talking to him in person. You really need to understand the file formats to be able to nest them into each other.
However, long story short, here are some links I found extremely useful for creating polyglots:
Some older Google Code Trunk
PoC of the polyglot stuff
Especially the second link (to github) will help you creating polyglots, but also understanding how they are working and how they are implemented. Since it is mostly Python stuff and very well / clean written, it is very useful and easy to follow.
I feel dissecting some file formats would be a good place to start. You can find many file format specifications for different file types through Google, but they can be a tough read and will likely take you some time to translate into whatever language you are using.
PDF: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf
ELF: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15213-s00/doc/elf.pdf
ZIP: http://kat.sdf.org/zip_file_format.txt
The language(s) you select will need a way to read and write raw bytes (not just ascii alphanumeric), so perhaps C would be good for more direct access to memory. Some Python tricks could help with open sourcing the scripts easily.
To dissect the files, you may want to build a tool kinda like https://github.com/kvesel/zipbrk/ to take them apart, then put them all back together in a polyglot format. For example, zip does not require the section headers to be at the start (or even contiguous for that matter), and PDF magic number can appear in multiple places within the file as well. I also believe I recall a polyglot tool being included in one of the PoC||GTFO publishings (maybe issue 8 or 2??) as a polyglot in the pdf file.
Don't forget the hackers bible! :)
https://nostarch.com/gtfo
I am looking for a (preferably) command line utility to stamp/watermark unicode text content into a PDF document.
I tried PDF Stamp and a couple of others that I found over the net, but to no avail with Greek characters (e.g. ΓΔΘΛ become ÃÄÈË).
Many thanks for any help!
With sufficiently "odd" characters, you generally need to specify a font and an encoding. I suspect that at least one of the tools you experimented with have the capability to define such things.
Reading their docs, it looks like PDFStamp will let you specify a font, but not an encoding. That doesn't bode well. It might always pick "Identity-H" for system fonts... worth trying.
I must admit, I'm surprised. "Disappointed" even. Have you contacted their email support?
Once upon a time, iText shipped with a number of command line tools that were mostly intended as examples but were none the less useful. I suspect you could dig them out of the SVN archive on sourceforge and get them to build again, if your Java-fu is up to the task. Just be sure to use BaseFont.IDENTITY_H whenever you're given a choice of encodings for a font.