Text Extraction (PDFTextStripper)

PDFTextStripper extracts plain text from PDF content streams while respecting text positioning, word spacing, and line breaks.

1. Overview

PDF content streams represent text as instructions such as:

• BT (Begin Text) and ET (End Text)
• Tf (Set Font and Size)
• Td / TD / Tm (Position and Text Matrix)
• Tj / TJ / ' / " (Show Text String and Kerning Arrays)

PDFTextStripper parses these operators, decodes string literals and hex sequences according to font encodings, and groups characters into words, sentences, and paragraphs.

2. Basic Text Extraction

Extract the entire text content of a PDF file:

use rust_pdf_box::prelude::*;
use rust_pdf_box::text::PDFTextStripper;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let doc = PdfDocument::open("document.pdf")?;

    let stripper = PDFTextStripper::new();
    let extracted_text = stripper.get_text(&doc.inner)?;

    println!("--- Extracted Content ---");
    println!("{}", extracted_text);

    Ok(())
}

3. Page-by-Page Extraction

To extract text from specific pages:

use rust_pdf_box::prelude::*;
use rust_pdf_box::text::PDFTextStripper;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let doc = PdfDocument::open("document.pdf")?;
    let stripper = PDFTextStripper::new();

    let page_count = doc.page_count();
    for page_num in 1..=page_count {
        let page_text = stripper.get_page_text(&doc.inner, page_num)?;
        println!("=== Page {} ===", page_num);
        println!("{}", page_text);
    }

    Ok(())
}

4. CLI Extraction

You can also use the standalone pdfbox command-line tool:

# Print to stdout
pdfbox text document.pdf

# Save to output file
pdfbox text document.pdf extracted_output.txt