PdfToTxt

PdfToTxt is a simple package for converting a PDF file into TXT with PHP

Installation via Composer

composer require raphaelramosds/pdf-to-txt

Example

Converts file.pdf into file.txt and save it on path/to/txt directory

$ptt = new PdfToTxt('path/to/file.pdf', 'path/to/txt', 'file');
$ptt->convert();

Web

You can also use it as a web application. Just clone the repository, build the Docker image and run the container with Docker Compose

Web interface for converting PDF files to TXT

Dependencies

Unfortunately, this package can only be used in a Linux environment. Additionally, you will need to install the following dependencies

Tesseract OCR package

# Install Tesseract OCR and its support to PT-BR language
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-por

ImageMagick

# Install
sudo apt install imagemagick php-imagick

# Enable imagick extension
sudo phpenmod imagick

# (Optional) Check if it is enabled
php -m | grep imagick

How does it work?

It uses ImageMagick to convert all PDF pages into JPG format, extracts their content using Tesseract OCR and compiles the results into a single TXT file.

Ghostscript support

While some PDF files use standard fonts that can be easily mapped to text, others rely on custom fonts which often store characters as vector graphics. In such cases, OCR becomes necessary to extract readable content. Therefore, in the future, I plan to add Ghostscript support to this package as an alternative method for handling these PDFs without relying solely on OCR.

You can use the following Ghostscript command to convert a PDF into a plain text file

gs -sDEVICE=txtwrite -o file.txt file.pdf

Before using this approach, it's recommended to check which fonts are used in the PDF. You can do that with the following command

gs -DPDFINFO file.pdf

Tests

Unit tests were written with PHPUnit

./vendor/bin/phpunit tests