I sometimes want to extract text from a PDF in a project of mine. The dependencies to do so can be annoying to set up, especially in many hosted environments. Most of the existing off-the-shelf solutions are incredibly janky and/or expensive. Thus, here is a quick "pdftotext as a web service" made friendly for hackers.
You can use my demo instance for free or quickly deploy your own. pdftotextcloud is non-blocking and designed to run efficiently on a single free Heroku dyno.
You'll need heroku-toolbelt. Clone this repo and then from the directory.
$ heroku create
$ heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git
$ heroku config:add PATH=/app/vendor/poppler/bin:/app/bin:/app/node_modules/.bin:bin:node_modules/.bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
$ git push heroku master
If you want to hack on this locally you'll additionally need NodeJS/NPM and a copy of pdttotext in your path. To get pdftotext:
- Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt-get install poppler-utils. - MacOSX
sudo port install popplerorbrew install poppler. - Windows download and install Xpdf.
Then do a npm install, etc etc.