Extracting titles from PDF files?

Question

I want to write a script to rename downloaded papers with their titles automatically, I'm wondering if there is any library or tricks i can make use of? The PDFs are all generated by TeX and should have some 'formal' structures.

Answer 1

You could try to use pyPdf and this example.

for example:

from pyPdf import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader

def get_pdf_title(pdf_file_path):
    with open(pdf_file_path) as f:
        pdf_reader = PdfFileReader(f) 
        return pdf_reader.getDocumentInfo().title

title = get_pdf_title('/home/user/Desktop/my.pdf')

Answer 2

Assuming all these papers are from arXiv, you could instead extract the arXiv id (I'd guess that searching for "arXiv:" in the PDF's text would consistently reveal the id as the first hit).

Once you have the arXiv reference number (and have done a pip install arxiv), you can get the title using

paper_ref = '1501.00730'
arxiv.query(id_list=[paper_ref])[0].title