Getting data out of PDF documents really is this easy

Just download PDFxStream for Java or .NET to use these examples as the foundation for your own PDF data extraction solutions.

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PDFxStream for Java is written in 100% pure Java, with no native components or dependencies. Its only requirement is a compliant Java 1.5 (or higher) JVM.

PDFxStream is suitable for use in demanding desktop and server applications, including those with significant concurrency requirements. It has been designed to be amenable to parallelization, so that you can fully utilize your hardware and infrastructure investments when processing PDF documents without worrying about locking or race conditions.

Of course, being a Java library, PDFxStream may be used by any JVM language that supports interoperability with Java APIs, including Clojure, Scala, Groovy, JRuby, Jython, and so on.

PDFTextStream has two main goals when it extracts data from a PDF document: do it accurately, and do it fast.

Which of those two attributes is more important to your application is something only you can decide. However, in many environments, text extraction performance isn't just a nice-to-have: it's critical to your project's success. That's why we're glad to be able to make such a bold claim without reservation, and we have the numbers to back it up.

Each component included in PDFxStream's API addresses a different class of data available to be extracted from PDF documents:

• PDFxStream Base is the foundation upon which all other PDFxStream features are built. It implements basic PDF file capabilities, and provides access to the simplest pools of data in PDF files.
• PDFTextStream provides comprehensive PDF text extraction capabilities
• PDFImageStream provides comprehensive PDF image extraction capabilities
• PDFFormStream provides easy extraction and filling of interactive and XFA forms found in PDF documents

Having one dependency and one API to satisfy your PDF data extraction requirements simplifies project management and minimizes development costs. Even so, you only need to pay for the components you use.

PDFTextStream

• Unicode text extraction, including support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) in both horizontal and vertical writing modes
• OutputHandler API for efficiently customizing PDF text extract formatting
• Regional text extraction, ideal for extracting data from fixed-format forms
• Complete support for embedded and standard fonts and character encodings:
  • Type 0, 1, and 1C
  • TrueType
  • Identity-H and Identity-V encodings
  • CMap encodings (including hundreds of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean character sets, both horizontal and vertical writing modes)
• Automated layout processing, providing a traversable PDF document model including inferred block, line, column, and table structure
• Support for extracting text from "searchable image" PDFs
• Support for all varieties of rotated text
• Comprehensive support for extracting PDF tables, including via CSV for export to Excel
• Support for indexing PDF documents with Apache Lucene via lucene-pdf

The official PDF file format specification (published by Adobe) is large and complex. PDF files can be rich, dynamic documents, and getting to all of the interesting and useful parts of them (i.e. their content, text, metadata, etc) is a daunting task.

Further, Adobe's specification only provides normative descriptions of how PDF documents should be constructed. Experience shows that applications must often process PDF documents from multiple sources, each of which may (and do) generate PDF files that sometimes bend and often break the "official" PDF specification — similar to how web browsers are forced to support broken and malformed HTML documents as best as they can.

This is just one of the many reasons why continually supporting and maintaining PDFxStream is a never-ending task. Doing anything else would prevent us from guaranteeing maximum compatibility with all PDF document formats and variants "in the field", regardless of their source or to what degree they violate certain rules of good PDF file format etiquette.

PDF Format Support Details

The range of PDF file format features (and quirks!) that PDFxStream supports is broad and deep. To the right is a partial list of the major facets of the PDF specification that PDFxStream supports. If you are aware of a particular detail that is not listed, then please feel free to contact us to confirm that PDFxStream supports what you need.