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Reading text contents of page #93
Description
Hi, thanks for working on this project. It has met my needs beautifully with one exception (and it's probably a lack of understanding on my part).
I couldn't find a very intuitive way to get the contents of a page and verify its text content.
While generating a new page and inserting it into a document was very straight-forward, I'd like to also test this functionality, including that the expected contents end up on the page (it's dynamically generated). So when writing a test, I'd like to create a page, insert several lines of text, and then bring that page back in to verify that the expected lines of text exist on that page.
Am I overlooking something obvious, or are we lacking this functionality in a straight-forward way?
Thanks!
Activity
Hopding commentedon Apr 16, 2019
Hello @matthopson.
pdf-libis primarily focused on creating and editing PDFs right now. It does not currently have functionality to extract text content from them. Though, this is functionality I've considered adding at some point in the future.For your use case, I'd suggest using
pdf.jsto extract text from the documents you create/modify withpdf-lib.pdf.jsis a library specifically designed to extract text, images, etc... from PDFs for rendering. here's an example of using it in Node.Let me know if you have any further questions!
matthopson commentedon Apr 16, 2019
Thanks for the response. I had considered this, but was hoping to not have to use two separate PDF libraries to do this, but it sounds like that's my best bet for the time being.
Thanks!
themaxempire23 commentedon Aug 7, 2024
Hi, thank you for working on this cool library, what a team.
I would like to find out if its possible to use pdf-lib to get specic text from a pdf file using coordinates, as in were the specific text is on the page?
I'm working on a simple feature in a react ocr(optical character recorgnition using tesseract) app, with node js and espress as the server, my goal is for a user to simply upload a scanned pdf and a specific number is extracted from the document.
looking forward to your cool response
kind regards
Merge pull request Hopding#93 from Rapha-Y/get-best-font-return
LucBerge commentedon May 13, 2026
Hello @Hopding,
6 years from your previous comment regarding text extraction, is there now a way to extract text ?
I couldn't find anything so far.
It seems to be a widely requested feature and not so difficult to implement.
Why not doing it ?