Four Best PDF Text Extraction Python Libraries

rajath cs
1 min readDec 3, 2020

Introduction

Recently I participated in a hackathon conducted by Georgia State University (HackGSU) during which, as a part of my project, I had to write a Flask API that extracts information from PDF documents ( a typical resume). Yes, a typical task. Checkout our cool project here. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPpEHKzFR0I).

During the process of building the same I found out that there are dozens of python based libraries that do the same. However, I felt it’s best to introduce the best of them to the python community. The reason for choosing these are completely based on their accuracy and on their github forks and stars count and downloads on pypi.

Notes:

  1. There are tons of libraries that specifically extract tabular data from PDF and also for report creation, I have not considered those.
  2. You’ll have to separately install these libraries on your system or in a virtual environment.

Libraries:

For each library the code block is self explanatory with the comments.

  1. PYPDF2

2. PYMUPDF

3. PDFMINER

4. PDFPLUMBER

Bonus:

  1. Check out this cool deep learning based text processing library: https://github.com/kermitt2/delft
  2. Check out a OCR based PDF processing technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcmEMcEzV9M

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