Most versions of iTextSharp (now iText as of version 7) are covered by the AGPL. One of the more well established PDF libraries in C#. Consult someone who understands this stuff if licensing is a real issue for you. I'll be using the sample PDF found here but you can use any PDF file.įor the licensing discussion below - the traditional disclaimer that I am not a lawyer, I don't particularly understand software licenses. NET Core 2.1 on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2017. If you don't want to run OCR and you don't want to fork out a considerable amount of money for commercially licensed PDF software, what are your options for getting text out of a PDF in C#?įor the following examples I'm targeting.

They're not primarily designed to transmit the text in a useful way, it's pretty much a side effect of the requirement to render the document that it even contains text at all.įor this reason some people just run OCR against all PDF documents and rely on the OCR to extract text from what is, and I'm repeating myself here, basically an image. With that in mind there's no such thing as 'perfect' (or a lot of the time even passable) text extraction from PDFs. There are even some documents containing fonts where the text information has no actual relationship to the displayed glyphs, you might have encountered them before in these documents if you highlight and copy paste some text that appears 'normal' when you paste it to another application it's just nonsense. The text content included in a document mostly just defines where letters from a font should be drawn. The presence of fonts in the file helps applications that display PDFs draw text in (almost) the same way across platforms. The fact it contains text and font information is almost, but not quite, incidental. This means whatever platform you view it on, it should look (more-or-less) identical, whether you're on Windows, Linux, Chrome, Android, etc. At a very high level it's a set of images defining how the pages in the document should appear. To those unfamiliar with it I'd describe a PDF file as a picture. It's a good question and the answer lies in trade-offs made when the PDF format was designed.

I have been looking at iText and Adobe API, however both are not available for free (for iText a commercial license is required and Adobe has only a free trial version for 6 months).The question anyone who has tried to extract text from a PDF using C# will have asked themselves at one point or another is: why is this so complicated?

Or you are specifically looking for external tools only to read the data?ĭo you have any good recommendation for the extract of text from a PDF file? I would like to avoid opening the file, therefore I'm searching for other options.Īdditional problem with this PDF is, that part of it is interactive, so even when I'm opening it and save as txt file -> some values are not transferred to txtĭid you try fetching the data by creating a small process which will just launch PDF, performs Ctrl+A to select the data, Ctrl+C to copy the data and then pasting the data in your desired location e.g. Consultant - Automation Developer,īlue Prism Community MVP | Blue Prism 7x Certified Professional Intelligent Process Automation Consultant | Sr. Hope it helps you out and if my solution resolves your query, then please mark it as the 'Best Answer' so that the others members in the community having similar problem statement can track the answer easily in future Once you have the data written on the excel file, you can use the 'Utility - MS Excel VBO' for extracting the content to a text file if required. You can use the following DX Exchange asset which will convert your PDF file to Excel using in-built Office operations hence no licensing issue should happen as long as you have a valid Microsoft Office software suite with you: Function for DX InDev PDF to Excel Converter

Itext pdf extract text