How does one obtain the location of text in a PDF with PDFMiner?

Question

PDFMiner's documentation says:

PDFMiner allows one to obtain the exact location of text in a page

However, I have not been able to find how to do this. PDFMiner's 'documentation' is rather sparse, so I have not understood how to do this.

Answer 1

You are looking for the bbox property on every layout object. There is a little bit of information on how to parse the layout hierarchy in the PDFMiner documentation, but it doesn't cover everything.

Here's an example:

from pdfminer.pdfdocument import PDFDocument
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFParser
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.converter import PDFPageAggregator
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams, LTTextBox, LTTextLine, LTFigure


def parse_layout(layout):
    """Function to recursively parse the layout tree."""
    for lt_obj in layout:
        print(lt_obj.__class__.__name__)
        print(lt_obj.bbox)
        if isinstance(lt_obj, LTTextBox) or isinstance(lt_obj, LTTextLine):
            print(lt_obj.get_text())
        elif isinstance(lt_obj, LTFigure):
            parse_layout(lt_obj)  # Recursive


fp = open('example.pdf', 'rb')
parser = PDFParser(fp)
doc = PDFDocument(parser)

rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
laparams = LAParams()
device = PDFPageAggregator(rsrcmgr, laparams=laparams)
interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
for page in PDFPage.create_pages(doc):
    interpreter.process_page(page)
    layout = device.get_result()
    parse_layout(layout)

If you are interested in the location of individual LTChar objects, you can recursively parse into the child layout objects of LTTextBox and LTTextLine just like what is done with LTFigure in the above example.