Text search API

[arturadib]

@notmasteryet As I understand it you'll be tackling text search soon. @hubgit and I have been talking about extracting text from PDFs, and it'd be nice if we have an API for that.

Does it make sense to build the search feature on top of a PDFDoc() API that extracts the text from each individual page?

@hubgit Feel free to chime in on your needs here.

[jviereck]

I'm wondering how this will look from an infrastructure point of view. We can reuse the IR extracted by the PartialEvaluator and look for showSpacedText and showText commands or we add a new function PartialEvaluator.getText(), that only returns a stream of text as found on one page.

Calling such a PartialEvaluator.getText() should be more performant and as people asked frequently to extract only text content from a PDF, it might be useful to have such a function.

[arturadib]

Calling such a PartialEvaluator.getText() should be more performant

That sounds good. It'd be nice if we could offer a more friendly wrapper in PDFDoc() or Page() so that consumers of the API don't have to deal with an object from the guts of the code though (PartialEvaluator).

How about page.getText(), since users already have to deal with the page object?

[yurydelendik]

We have getTextContent (see https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/blob/master/src/api.js#L394). Closing as resolved