I know very little about the structure of PDF files, and having poked around for a couple of days I think I need some advice/guidance on how to get started.
I need to be able to parse out some data from various PDF files. The files are all quotes from several different vendors and the one thing they all have in common is the data I need (part numbers, descriptions, costs, etc) are all in some form of a “table”. I’m not sure if the “tables” would be actual PDF tables (I think that’s a thing) or just text objects more or less lined up in rows and columns.
I have been exploring my sample PDFs with the MBS DynaPDF plugin and I can get the page coordinates of the various text objects. So one approach would be to organize the text by coords, look for some keywords that would be in the column headers, and read the row data until I’m no longer in the “table”.
Is there a better way?
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