LibPdf

LibPdf is a fast and efficient Node.js library for converting PDF files to text. This open-source project aims to simplify the process of extracting text content from PDFs, making it easier for developers to work with PDF data in their applications.

Features

• Fast PDF to text conversion
• Easy-to-use API

Installing libpdf

To install libpdf and its dependencies, ensure you have a supported version of Node installed. You can install the project with npm. In the project directory, run:

$ npm install libpdf --save

This command fully installs the project, including installing any dependencies.

Building libpdf

To build libpdf, you need to have Rust installed. If you have already installed the project and only want to run the build, use:

$ npm run build

Exploring libpdf

After building libpdf, you can explore its exports at the Node REPL.

Using Node Shell

1. Install libpdf:

   $ npm install libpdf --save

2. Open Node REPL:

   $ node

3. Execute the following commands:

   > const pdfFile = require("fs").readFileSync("doc.pdf")
   > const doc = require("libpdf").document(pdfFile);
   > console.log(doc);

Using a JavaScript file

1. Create a file named index.ts with the following content:

   const pdfFile = require('fs').readFileSync("doc.pdf");
   const doc = require('libpdf').document(pdfFile);
   console.log(doc);

2. Run the file with Node:

   $ node index.ts

This setup ensures you can easily install, build, and explore the capabilities of libpdf.

Benchmark Result

conclusion

1. Best for Small and Medium PDFs: libPdf consistently performs the fastest for small and medium PDF files, showing significant speed advantages over pdf-lib and pdf-parse.

2. Balanced Performance: pdf-parse offers a middle-ground performance across all file sizes but is generally slower than libPdf for smaller files and pdf-lib for medium files.

3. Inefficiency with Complex PDFs: libPdf shows a notable drop in performance with complex PDFs, taking significantly longer compared to pdf-parse and pdf-lib.

4. Library Efficiency: pdf-lib excels with small and medium PDFs but struggles significantly with large and complex documents, making it less suitable for those cases.

Future Steps (TODO)

• Run Benchmark
• Add support for extracting text from specific pages
• Improve text extraction accuracy for complex PDFs
• Implement batch processing for multiple PDFs
• Add CLI support for direct command-line usage
• Create detailed documentation and examples

Known issues

• Not supported for Identity-H encoding

Contributing

We welcome contributions to improve LibPdf! Feel free to submit issues and pull requests on our GitHub repository.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 license.

https://x.com/CeylonAIDev