From PDf to String

Question

What is the easiest way to get the text (words) of a PDF file as one long String or array of Strings.

I have tried pdfbox but that is not working for me.

Answer 1

use iText. The following snippet for example will extract the text.

PdfTextExtractor parser =new PdfTextExtractor(new PdfReader("C:/Text.pdf"));
parser.getTextFromPage(3);

Answer 2

PDFBox barfs on many newer PDFs, especially those with embedded PNG images.

I was very impressed with PDFTextStream

Answer 3

JPedal and Multivalent also offer text extraction in Java or you could access xpdf using Runtime.exec