Convert PDF to text

The PDF format is like a markup language. But oftern it is converted to equivalent binary. The human readable markup is derived from PostScript, which is similar to procedural programming. PDF can be back and forth conveted to the binary & text format specification (qpdf can do this).

It has features to embed images, fonts etc. It can supports forms and interactivity. There are different libraries to work with PDF files. Two powerful ones are:

• Poppler
• qpdf

Poppler has a Python library wrapper too. qpdf can convert PDF to a custom JSON format, which is easier to work with.

Most text is stored by specifying the co-ordinates. The content is also arranged to pages. PDF format can contain meta data, bookmarks etc. too.