Read text in pdf files

[ChrisReed]

Hi Doug,

Yeah we developed similar LabVIEW code, but I still might try some of these other applications that can read the PDF file directly.

Thanks

Chris

[rolfk]

You may want to go through this here and check out especially the development libraries, if you really want to go the path of creating your own.

From a quick view at it I think promising candidates might be libharu, poppler and podofo. Poppler seems to fully support PDF forms but being GPL is likely not a possibility to use unless you want to distribute every LabVIEW application that makes use of it in full source. Even then I'm not sure GPL would allow to run it legally from an application created in LabVIEW since LabVIEW itself is not Open Source at all. XPDF being X Windows based probably would be a bad fit for most LabVIEW uses but poppler is derived from it and may have superseded it in the meantime in terms of features.

These libraries are all shared libraries and might be harder to integrate into LabVIEW for someone not having experience with this. But PDFBox as ActiveX component seems to have been ruled out already as an option

[Evan]

I know this is really old but here are my 2 cents.  I was having .NET issues, where I could not get the assemby to link.

Workaround... use system exec to run the executable (ExtractText in the bin folder) and create a text file from it.  Then parse the text.... worked for me.

[Morben]

Hello Evan,

Can you please elaborate more on how you solve the pdf read text? A block diagram will do.

I was trying the PDFBox method but when linking the PDDocument, it reads "An error occurrend trying to load assembly" under Objects.

Thanks,

Morben

[Evan]

This is the area of interest.  Basically in the extract PDF mentioned earlier there is an actual EXE rather than the .NET stuff.  So run that exectuable with the -html in the command and it will create a html file for you.  I then opened that HTML file and parsed it as I needed.

[Morben]

Evan thanks for the reply, it really helped!

[papai11]

Hi everyone,

I saw an example about display HTML file on control "WebBrowser", but the Block Diagram was hid code. Someone could give me examples to display a html or pdf file on Front Panel, plesea. Im using LabVIEW 2009. 

Thanks you so much! 

[Dhubbell]

Here's an example of how to display a PDF.  Path it out to your PDF and it will display in the front panel.  Attached VI and test.pdf files.

[Evan]

There are a ton of examples around that use the webbrowser ActveX control.

Check the shipping examples for "ActiveX" and there is a callback example for IE that uses it.

[aro1]

Hello Evan

I am trying read txt from a pdf using the explanation and block diagram you posted. However I saw error messages in my "standard error" indicator as opposed to seeing converted pdf-txt contents in my "standard output" indicator :(. Please could let me know what I may be doing wrong?