Search Components Online

PDF Box - Text Extraction and Highlighting

PDFBox is an API for extracting and highlighting  text from Adobe Acrobat documents (AKA PDF files).

Text extraction: (from their site)

PDFBox is an open source Java PDF library for working with PDF documents. This project allows creation of new PDF documents, manipulation of existing documents and the ability to extract content from documents. PDFBox also includes several command line utilities.

http://www.pdfbox.org/

PDF Highlighting (from their site)

There are cases when you might want to highlight text in a PDF document. For example, if the PDF is the result of a search request you might want to highlight the word in the resulting PDF document. There are several ways this can be achieved, each method varying in complexity and flexibility.

http://www.pdfbox.org/userguide/highlighting.html

PDF Text Extraction Tool

FreewareFiles.com has a nice PDF text extraction tool.  From the description:

Ease Pdf to Text Extractor is a free software designed to extract text from Adobe PDF files. It does NOT need Adobe Acrobat software.It processes at very high speed and you can convert multiple PDF files to text files at one time. The program is freeware, which means that you can use it either personally or commercially for free.

Warning: a few dynamic ads on this site.
http://www.freewarefiles.com/Ease-PDF-To-Text-Extractor_program_43618.html

Python PDF Text Tools

We've recently discovered PDFMiner, a PDF parser and analyzer tool written entirely in Python. Actually, PDFMiner is a suite of tools including a parser,  a text renderer, and tools for extracting text. Yusuke Shinyama, who is at NYU, has brought together a number of capabilities in the form of two Python programs: pdf2txt and dumppdf. PDFMiner also supports multi-byte languages with an additional map file. The progams let you find the precise locaiton of test within a PDF, which is a major advantage over many other PDF tools you'll find.

PDFMiner even has a cool PDF to HTML conversion demo page to see what kinds of things you can do with PDFMiner, although some of the PDFs we tried did not display with true fidelity. Nonetheless, the tools provide insight into the kinds of things you may be able to do with PDF files in your custom pipeline stage, in the OPpenPipelin, or just for poking around.

The Subversion repository is maintained at Google's code.google.com, and you can download the PDFMiner source from www.unixuser.com.

PDF to MS Word, HTML or Text

These folks are offering quite a few free and low cost file conversion tools for PDF, which would be handy to have if you were writing a web spider that needed to handle PDF.

http://pdf-to-html-word.com/download.htm then see the download page.