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I ran into a curious problem for a side problem of mine where I had some information in PDF files, both text and images.  What I want to do is display the information from the PDF’s on a mobile (Android) device.  PDF isn’t exactly a mobile friendly format, so I got the idea use HTML.  The next trick then becomes how to get the content out of the PDF’s I want into HTML.  Tux to the rescue!

As luck would have the, the utilities pdftotext and pdfimage will allow you to extract your text and images from a PDF (respectively).  pdftotext was even nice enough to extract the text from the PDF and put it into an HTML document for me. (To get these on your Ubuntu box:   sudo apt-get install xpdf-utils).  Once I had these apps installed, I used a bit of Ruby to automate the process – I had 65 PDF’s to convert and wasn’t crazy about the keystrokes involved for all 65 files.  Net time to do all this was a comfortable couple of hours in front of my TV catching up on the backlog of shows on the PVR.  How is that for multi-tasking?

Here is the Ruby script I wrote.  I welcome suggestions / improvements / enhancements / comments / cash donations / bottles of scotch:

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#!/usr/bin/ruby
Dir.glob("*.txt") do |file| File.delete(file) end
Dir.glob("*.jpg") do |file| File.delete(file) end
Dir.glob("*.pdf") do |file|
	basename = File.basename(file,'.*')
	if (File.directory?(basename))
		Dir.glob("./#{basename}/*.*") do |file2| File.delete(file2) end
	else
	  Dir.mkdir basename unless File.directory?(basename)
	end
	system("pdftotext", "-htmlmeta", file, "./#{basename}/#{basename}.html")
	system("pdfimages", "-j",  file, "./#{basename}/")
	puts "Converted #{file} to text and extracted images to #{basename}."
end

This entry was posted by tom on March 17, 2011 at 18:09 under Programming. Tagged , . Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Comment

  1. Mike says:

    Thanks for this. I am about to embark on a similar requirement for some old files while still learning Linux and Ruby. This will help lots.

    March 19, 2011, 00:00