Extract PDF text and store in custom column

[diazlaz]

Hi All,

I interested in developing a plugin in that will allow me to extract the text of a PDF file and store it in a custom text or comment column. I have around 8,000 PDFs (already ocr, small amount of text usually 1 page or less from scanned images) imported into calibre from a document management system. I would like to be able to search and tag documents from the text in extracted and stored in this custom column.

I was thinking of the following:

1. enumerate the selected files (select PDF types)
2. open/extract the PDF text content from PDF file
3. store in column

Is there a python library or api already included that will allow me to easily extract the pdf text from the file. I'm new to Python and will look to learn some of it this weekend, I fairly comfortable with perl

Many thanks!
Laz.

[BetterRed]

My experience is that searches will be slower if the Comments column or similar long text columns are included in 'the places to search' - AFAIK the contents aren't indexed.

But that's no reason to not go ahead with a PI

BR

[kovidgoyal]

Simply use calibre to bulk convert your PDF files to txt. That will extract the text from them (assuming they have actual extractable text, which is not always the case with PDF files).