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).
This following modifications have been made:
-
encode URI (using
xmlURIEscapefrom 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
-blockoption is selected, -
add a parameter
-readingOrderwhich 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.
-
more to come!
See the file INSTALL for more details.
-
Install libxml2 (Should be already installed on your linux distribution). See http://xmlsoft.org/
-
Compile the zlib and png libraries, under subdirectory /images:
make -f (MAKEFILE being make.bat or make.linux64)
-
Install xpdf. See http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
-
create libxpdf.a in xpdf-XX/xpdf/ with
ar -rc libxpdf.a *.o
- 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
This version has been modified by Patrice Lopez (patrice.lopez@science-miner.com).
As the original pdf2xml, GPL2.
version 1.0.0 July 2007
The Xpdf software and documentation are copyright 1996-2007 Glyph & Cog, LLC.
Email: derekn@foolabs.com 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.
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
pdftoxml is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2.
pdftoxml is developed and tested on a Linux 2.4 x86 system. In addition, it has been compiled on a Win32 system.
The latest version is available from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pdf2xml Source code is available from: http://pdf2xml.cvs.sourceforge.net/pdf2xml/
To run pdftoxml, simply type:
pdftoxml.exe file.pdf
Command line options and many other details are(should be) described in sourceforge
See the separate file, INSTALL.
Hervé Déjean (src) Sophie Andrieu (src) Jean-Yves Vion-Dury (schemas)