How to extract text from a PDF file?

Question

I\'m trying to extract the text included in this PDF file using Python.

I\'m using the PyPDF2 module, and have the following script:

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Answer 1

You may want to use time proved xPDF and derived tools to extract text instead as pyPDF2 seems to have various issues with the text extraction still.

The long answer is that there are lot of variations how a text is encoded inside PDF and that it may require to decoded PDF string itself, then may need to map with CMAP, then may need to analyze distance between words and letters etc.

In case the PDF is damaged (i.e. displaying the correct text but when copying it gives garbage) and you really need to extract text, then you may want to consider converting PDF into image (using ImageMagik) and then use Tesseract to get text from image using OCR.