Read Pdf with C

Question

I want to be able to read the content of pdf files. I need to do that with C on Linux.

The closer i can get to this was here but I think Haru can only create pdf and is not able to read them (not 100% sure).

PS: I only need the plain text from pdf

Solution 1

Check out libpoppler. I've never used it work extracting text, just querying PDF attributes. It's pretty easy to use.

Solution 2

How well do you need to parse them? Just extracting strings should be relatively easy, fully accurate rendering is harder. Take a look at the source for evince or ghostscript?

This is for C++ but might be a good starting point for understanding PDF structure http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cpp/ExtractPDFText.aspx (sorry wrong link before)

Comments

[Rui Carneiro]

I only need the plain text from pdf files.

[Rui Carneiro]

I think libpoppler is too "big" for what i want. It uses QT and other stuff that i think it is unnecessary.

[Ehab Developer]

Poppler has optional frontends for glib and Qt (to fit nicely into their object systems), but is not required.

[Rui Carneiro]

Ok! I saw that it is already on Ubuntu repositories. I will take a look.