Converting PDF to Text in C#

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How to parse PDF files

While extending the indexing solution for an intranet built using the DotLucene fulltext search library I decided to add support for PDF files. But DotLucene can only handle plain text so the PDF files had to be converted.

After hours of Googling I found a reasonable solution that uses "pure" .NET - at least there are no other dependencies other than a few assemblies of IKVM.NET. Before we start with the solution let's take a look at the other ways I tried.

Using Adobe PDF IFilter

Using Adobe PDF IFilter requires:

1. Using unreliable COM interop that handles IFilter interface (and the combination of IFilter COM and Adobe PDF IFilter is especially troublesome) and
2. A separate installation of Adobe IFilter on the target system. This can be painful if you need to distribute your indexing solution to someone else.

Read more about using IFilter in Microsoft Office Documents Parsing.

Using iTextSharp

iTextSharp is a .NET port of iText, a PDF manipulation library for Java. It is primarily focused on creating and not reading PDFs but there are some classes that allow you to read PDF - especially PdfReader. But extracting the text from the hierarchy of objects is not an easy task (PDF is not a simple format, the PDF Reference is 7 MB - compressed - PDF file). I was able to get to PdfArray, PdfBoolean, PdfDictionary and other objects but after some hours of trying to resolve PdfIndirectReference I gave up and threw away the iTextSharp based parser.

Finally: PDFBox

PDFBox is another Java PDF library. It is also ready to use with the original Java Lucene (see LucenePDFDocument).

Fortunately, there is a .NET version of PDFBox that is created using IKVM.NET (just download the PDFBox package, it's in the bin directory).

Using PDFBox in .NET requires adding references to:

• PDFBox-0.7.2.dll
• IKVM.GNU.Classpath

and copying IKVM.Runtime.dll to the bin directory.

Using the PDFBox to parse PDFs is fairly easy:

private static string parseUsingPDFBox(string filename)
{
    PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(filename);
    PDFTextStripper stripper = new PDFTextStripper();
    return stripper.getText(doc);
}

The size of the required assemblies adds up to almost 16 MB:

• IKVM.GNU.Classpath.dll (7 MB)
• IKVM.Runtime.dll (360 kB)
• PDFBox-0.7.2.dll (8 MB)

The speed is not so bad: Parsing the U.S. Copyright Act PDF (1.4 MB) took about 7 seconds.

Related information

• See this article (with future updates) on DotLucene: PDF Documents Parsing.

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