go-pdfbox

Go package for working with the pdfbox command line tool, with an embedded copy of the pdfbox jarfile.

Motivation

This is a simple Go "wrapper" package for working with the pdfbox command line tool. It contains an embedded copy of the pdfbox jar file but depends on a local copy of Java to run. The goal of the tool is to hide some of the details of working with pdfbox in a Go context but my hope is that eventually this package can be retired in favour of being able to invoke a WASM-compiled version of pdfbox. Until then this package exists.

Documentation

Example

Error handling has been removed for the sake of brevity.

Basic

import (
	"context"       
	"github.com/sfomuseum/go-pdfbox"
)

func main() {

     ctx := context.Background()
     p, _ := pdfbox.New(ctx, "pdfbox://")
     p.Execute(ctx, "ExtractText", "example.pdf", "example.txt")
}     

Use with io.Reader and io.Writer

import (
       	"bytes"
	"bufio"		
	"context"       
	"github.com/sfomuseum/go-pdfbox"
	"os"
)

func main() {

     ctx := context.Background()

     r, _ := os.Open("example.pdf")

     var buf bytes.Buffer
     wr := bufio.NewWriter(&buf)

     p, _ := pdfbox.New(ctx, "pdfbox://")
     
     p.ExecuteWithReaderAndWriter(ctx, r, wr, "ExtractText", pdfbox.READER, pdfbox.WRITER)
}     

Note the use of the pdfbox.READER and pdfbox.WRITER variables. They are placeholder strings used to swap in the name of the temporary files created using the io.Reader and io.Writer variables respectively. The order of input and output files in pdfbox is not constant so it's easier just to be explicit about things rather than try to guess at positional elements.

See also

• https://pdfbox.apache.org/