PDFBoT API

PDFBoT is a tool for accurately extracting body text of the article in PDF format.

Publications

Please cite the following paper if you are using our tool. Thanks!

• Changfeng Yu, Cheng Zhang, and Jie Wang. 2020. Extracting Body Text from Academic PDF Documents for Text Mining. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (KDIR 2020).

Environment

MacOS with python3.6+ installed

Dependencies

• pdf2htmlEX
• bs4
• flask

Usage

Command to run PDFBoT API on local computer

python3 main.py

Once the builtin server is launched, head over to http://127.0.0.1:5000/. Follow the instrucation to upload PDF file to extract text.

Run the source code to extract the text

step 1 convert the PDF to HTML by the function "pdftohtml_test", in main.py L72.

• The input is the url of the PDF document.
• The output is the path of the corresponding HTML file.

step 2 extract body text from HTML file by the function "getTextFrom2HTML", in extractTextFrom2colHTML.py.

• The input is the path of the HTML file.
• The output is the a list of string, each string in the list represents one paragraph of the article in document.