Ruby: Reading PDF files

Question

I\'m looking for a fast and reliable way to read/parse large PDF files in Ruby (on Linux and OSX).

Until now I\'ve found the rather old and simple PDF-toolkit (a pd

Answer 1

Did you have a look at the CombinePDF library?

It's a pure ruby solution that allows some PDF manipulation, such as extracting pages, overlaying one PDF page over another, page numbering, writing basic text and tables, etc'.

Here's an example for stumping an existing PDF file with a logo. The example reads a PDF file, extracts one page to use as a stamp and stamps another PDF file.

require 'combine_pdf'
company_logo = CombinePDF.load("company_logo.pdf").pages[0]
pdf = CombinePDF.load "content_file.pdf"
pdf.pages.each {|page| page << company_logo}
pdf.save "content_with_logo.pdf"

You can also stamp text, number pages or use :

require 'combine_pdf'

pdf = CombinePDF.load "content_file.pdf"

pdf.number_pages #adds page numbers. you can add formatting and placement options.

pdf.pages.each {|page| page.textbox "One Way To Stamp"}

#you can a shortcut method to stamp pages
pdf.stamp_pages "Another way to stamp"

#you can use the shortcut method for both text and PDF stamps
company_logo = CombinePDF.load("company_logo.pdf").pages[0]
pdf.stamp_pages company_logo

# you can use write simple tables
pdf.pages[0].write_table headers: ['first name', 'surname'], table_data: [['John', 'Doe'], ['Mr.', 'Smith']]

pdf.save "content_with_logo.pdf"

It's not meant for complex operations, but it complements most PDF authoring libraries and allows you to use PDF templates instead of writing the whole thing from scratch.