I'm using itext7 to import data from a pdf but can't read all the text

Question

5.00/5 (1 vote)

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I have some PDFs of newspaper clippings (when opened in Chrome, the text in them is fully searchable and doesn't look scanned). However, when do I use itext7 I'm only getting the text above the dotted line (see link Untitled hosted at ImgBB — ImgBB[^]) and the footer.

What I have tried:

C#

using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream(pdfBytes))
{
    // Create reader from bytes
    using (PdfReader pdfReader = new PdfReader(memoryStream))
    {
        PdfDocument srcDoc = new PdfDocument(pdfReader);
        for (int p = 1; p <= srcDoc.GetNumberOfPages(); p++)
        {
            try
            {
                var page = srcDoc.GetPage(p);
                var strategy = new SimpleTextExtractionStrategy();
                var currentText = 
                 PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(page, strategy);

Posted 29-Aug-23 10:29am

punk_legend

Updated 13-Sep-23 6:45am

Deeksha Shenoy

v5

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Comments

Richard MacCutchan 30-Aug-23 3:43am

Most likely because the content of the PDF is a scanned image and not text. You can easily check this by examining the actual data in the file.

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Richard Deeming · Answer 1 · 2023-08-29T21:44:00

Solution 1

Based on your screenshot, the text beneath the dotted line is very clearly a scanned image of a newspaper cutting.

Chrome is most likely using OCR to extract the text from the image. iText does not do that for you out of the box. You'll need to use their add-on pdfOCR[^] for that.

Posted 29-Aug-23 21:44pm

Richard Deeming