Can I read PDF or Word Docs with Node.js?

Question

I can't find any packages to do this. I know PHP has a ton of libraries for PDFs (like http://www.fpdf.org/) but anything for Node?

Answer 1

textract is a great lib that supports PDFs, Doc, Docx, etc.

Answer 2

Looks like there's a few for pdf, but I didn't find any for Word.

CPU bound processing like that isn't really Node's strong point anyway (i.e. you get no additional benefits using node to do it over any other language). A pragmatic approach would be to find a good tool and utilise it from Node.

I have heard good things around the office about docsplit http://documentcloud.github.com/docsplit/

While it's not Node, you could easily invoke it from Node with http://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/all.html#child_process.exec

Answer 3

You can easily convert one into another, or use for example a .doc template to generate a .pdf file, but you will probably want to use an existing web service for this task.

This can be done using the services of Livedocx for example

To use this service from node, see node-livedocx (Disclaimer: I am the author of this node module)

Answer 4

I would suggest looking into unoconv for your initial conversion, this uses LibreOffice or OpenOffice for the actual conversion. Which adds some overhead.

I'd setup a few workers with all the necessities setup, and use a request/response queue for handling the conversion... (may want to look into kue or zmq)

In general this is a CPU bound and heavy task that should be offloaded... Pandoc and others specifically mention .docx, not .doc so they may or may not be options as well.

---

Note: I know this question is old, just wanted to provide a current answer for others coming across this.