Layout-Aware Text Extraction from Full-text PDF of Scientific Articles

Link: http://code.google.com/p/lapdftext/

Description: The Portable Document Format (PDF) is the almost universally used file format for online scientific publications. It is also notoriously difficult to read and handle computationally, presenting challenges for developers of biomedical text mining or biocuration informatics systems that use the published literature as an information source. To facilitate the effective use of scientific literature in such systems we introduce Layout-Aware PDF Text Extraction (LA-PDFText). The LA-PDFText system focuses only on the textual content of the research articles and is meant as a baseline for further experiments into more advanced extraction methods that handle multi-modal content, such as images and graphs. The system works in a three-stage process: (1) Detecting contiguous text blocks using spatial layout processing to locate and identify blocks of contiguous text, (2) Classifying text blocks into rhetorical categories using a rule-based method and (3) Stitching classified text blocks together in the correct order resulting in the extraction of text from section-wise grouped blocks.

Free Online File Converter

http://www.cometdocs.com/

Fantastic UI. Great Functionality with PDF to various file types (e.g. office files, HTML, ...).

Especially, it's free!

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Cheers,
Vu

PDF to raw texts

There are some ways to convert PDF files to raw text files. Two typical ways, just according to my opinion, are using and non-using OCR technology. PDFBox is a freely available tool non-using OCR technology, so the converted raw texts suffer some errors. To utilize OCR technology in conversion, we have some tricks as follows:
- use some free or commercial tools like SimpleOCR, VeryPDF, OmniPage ...
- copy-and-paste directly from PDF files. This trick is only applied to some PDF files that are not secured.
- use online tools (I am actually not sure about the internal technologies they are using :()

+ Adobe: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html
+ http://pdftextonline.com

- leverage Google OCR (means Google will do this for us):

http://www.labnol.org/software/convert-scanned-pdf-images-to-text-with-google-ocr/5158/

Convert Scanned PDFs to Text

Now if you have bunch of scanned PDF files on your hard drive and no OCR software, here’s what you can do to convert them into recognizable text.

Create a folder in your website (say abc.com/pdf) and upload all the PDF images to that folder. Now create a public web page that links to all the PDF files. Wait for the Google bots to spider your stuff.

Once done, type the query "site:abc.com/pdf filetype:pdf" to see the PDF documents as HTML.

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Cheers,
Vu