log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (org.apache.pdfbox.util.ResourceLoader).
log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.
This message means that you need to configure the log4j logging system. See the log4j documentation for more information.
PDFBox comes with a sample log4j configuration file. To use it you set a system property like this
java -Dlog4j.configuration=log4j.xml org.apache.pdfbox.ExtractText <PDF-file> <output-text-file>
If this is not working for you then you may have to specify the log4j config file using a URL path, like this:
log4j.configuration=file:///<path to config file>
No! Only one thread may access a single document at a time. You can have multiple threads each accessing their own PDDocument object.
You need to call close() on the PDDocument inside the finally block, if you don't then the document will not be closed properly. Also, you must close all PDDocument objects that get created. The following code creates two PDDocument objects; one from the "new PDDocument()" and the second by the load method.
PDDocument doc = new PDDocument();
try
{
doc = PDDocument.load( "my.pdf" );
}
finally
{
if( doc != null )
{
doc.close();
}
}Call getFieldTree() instead of getFields(). The later one only returns root-level fields.
Check whether the character is available in WinAnsiEncoding by looking at the PDF Specification Appendix D. If not, but if it is available in this font (in windows, have a look with charmap.exe), then load the font with PDType0Font.load(), see also in the EmbeddedFonts.java example in the source code download.
Windows or Mac usually have the minimum fonts needed. You do need fonts that aren't embedded in PDFs if these fonts are outside of the "Standard 14 fonts" set, and any specific fonts that you want when you are creating PDFs.
For rendering and text extraction, you'll need the "Standard 14 fonts" mentioned in the
PDF specification: Times-Roman, Helvetica, Courier, Symbol, Times-Bold, Helvetica-Bold, Courier-Bold,
Symbol, ZapfDingbats, Times-Italic, Helvetica-Oblique, Courier-Oblique, Times-BoldItalic,
Helvetica-BoldOblique, Courier-BoldOblique. You can get most of these fonts on linux by running
sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer. Arial is as good as Helvetica.
MS-Gothic can be used instead of ZapfDingbats.
See also this stackoverflow answer about getting ZapfDingbats
from ghostscript fonts. The Times/Courier/Helvetica fonts can also be replaced with the appropriate
Liberation or Nimbus fonts. The exact substitution logic that PDFBox uses can be read in the file
FontMapperImpl.java from the source code download.
To create PDFs with "Standard 14 fonts" only, no extra fonts files are needed (version 2.0.5 or higher), as these are not embedded and PDFBox has all the metrics and no longer needs to access the actual fonts.
If your program runs properly when the font is loaded from a file but not when loaded from the resources, check whether resource filtering is activated in the maven-resources-plugin in your maven build script, and disable it for font files. See this stackoverflow answer on how to fix this.
I'd like to use PDFBox to create a complex layout containing several paragraphs, tables, images etc. Is PDFBox fit for that purpose?
PDFBox being a low level PDF library provides the APIs to create page content such as text, images etc. But at this point in time it doesn't provide a higher level API to do page layout, paragraph handling, automatic line wrapping or create tables and such.
But PDFBox is the foundation of some projects which might help in that case. This includes projects such as
You may also want to consider using Apache FOP which allows to create complex documents from XML data and templates-
Make sure that you closed your content stream before saving.
By default, text extraction is done in the same sequence as the text in the PDF page content stream.
PDF is a graphic format, not a text format, and unlike HTML, it has no requirements that text one on page
be rendered in a certain order. The order is the one that was determined by the software that created the PDF.
To get text sorted from left to right and top to botton, use setSortByPosition(true).
Text extraction from a pdf document is a complicated task and there are many factors involved that effect the possibility and accuracy of text extraction. It would be helpful to the PDFBox team if you could try a couple things.
This is because the characters in a PDF document can use a custom encoding instead of unicode or ASCII. When you see gibberish text then it probably means that a meaningless internal encoding is being used. The only way to access the text is to use OCR. This may be a future enhancement.
This probably means that the "Resources" directory is not in your classpath. The Resources directory is included in the PDFBox jar so this is only a problem if you are building PDFBox yourself and not using the binary.
PDF documents have certain security permissions that can be applied to them and two passwords associated with them, an user password and an owner password. If the "cannot extract text" permission bit is set then you need to decrypt the document with the owner password in order to extract the text.
Not really, for a couple reasons.
The memory footprint depends on the PDF itself and on the resolution you use for rendering. Some possible options:
-Xmx value when starting javaPDDocument.load(file, MemoryUsageSetting.setupTempFileOnly())setSubsamplingAllowed(true) on your PDFRenderer objectListPDDocument objectsPDFRenderer.renderImage(), or the dpi value when calling PDFRenderer.renderImageWithDPI()PDImageXObject objects by calling PDDocument.setResourceCache() with a cache object that is derived from DefaultResourceCache and whose call public void put(COSObject indirect, PDXObject xobject) does nothing. Be aware that this will slow down rendering for PDF files that have an identical image in several pages (e.g. a company logo or a background). More about this can be read in PDFBOX-3700.This is because in some PDFs (e.g. the one in PDFBOX-2814), text is not rendered directly, but as a shaped clipping from a background. Java graphics does not support "soft clipping" https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-4212743, and because of that, the edges are not looking smooth. Soft clipping could be achieved with some extra steps, but these would cost additional time and memory space. You can have a higher quality by rendering at a higher dpi and then downscale the image.
Sadly, this is a known bug in Java Imaging. Use the twelvemonkeys library as described in the dependencies page.
This is a bug in the original java JPEG2000 decoder. You can see examples of such images in PDFBOX-1752 and related issues.
Use the newer (1.4.0 or higher) jai-imageio-jpeg2000 and jai-imageio-core decoders as explained in the dependencies page.
If display rendering happens within a decent time but not printing, then the cause is likely transparent elements. Java renders these much slower when printing, see here for an explanation, and PDFBOX-3046 and related issues for sample files.
A workaround is to use a specific dpi for the constructors of PDFPageable and PDFPrintable,
PDFBox will then render into an image
and print that one. You should experiment with 300, 600 and 1200 dpi by trying it with
the command-line app.