C# PDF Document Parser

• Download source code from Github

Read documentation.

Idea

The main approach of parsing by PdfDocumentParser is based on finding certain text or image fragments on a PDF page and then extracting text/images located and sized relatively to those fragments. 

Within this scope, PdfDocumentParser is capable of the following:

• search/extract text represented by PDF entities
• search/extract text obtained by OCR
• search/compare/extract page fragments as images

As a part of parsing routine, PdfDocumentParser allows checking custom conditions on a PDF page to decide which actions should be taken on it.

PdfDocumentParser facilitates parsing graphical tables to data arrays.

For more details refer to the documentation.

Template Editor

To be able to parse a PDF document, PdfDocumentParser must be supplied with a parsing template corresponding to the document's layout. For this goal, PdfDocumentParser provides Template Editor that allows creating and debugging parsing templates in an easy manner in GUI. Template Editor should be invoked by the hosting application.

Application

An application based on PdfDocumentParser has to care about the following main aspects:

• provide storage and management of parsing templates
• allow a user to create and modify templates with Template Editor
• implement a custom algorithm of processing PDF files:
  • choose a template to be applied on a PDF page
  • process data parsed by the chosen template

An example of such an app is SampleParser project in PdfDocumentParser solution.

Algorithm

Some basic algorithm of processing a PDF file page by page would be the following:

//Pseudo-code: processing a PDF file where every page requires choosing new template.
//Note: The classes and methods are not real and serve for simplicity and clarity only.

foreach(page in pdfFile)
{
    //find the right template for the page
    if(PdfDocumentParser.ActiveTemplate == null)
    {
        foreach(template in templates)
        {
            PdfDocumentParser.ActiveTemplate = template;
            if(PdfDocumentParser.IsCondition(page, "RightTemplateForPage"))
                break;
            PdfDocumentParser.ActiveTemplate = null;
        }
    }
    
    if(PdfDocumentParser.ActiveTemplate == null)
    {
        logWarning("No template matched to page: " + page.Number);
        continue;
    }
        
    //applying the chosen template to the page 
    object value1 = PdfDocumentParser.GetValue(page, "field1");
    //doing something with value1...
    <...>    
    object value2 = PdfDocumentParser.GetValue(page, "field2");
    //doing something with value2...
    <...>
}

Notice that conditions like 'RightTemplateForPage' are introduced and predetermined by the custom application. PdfDocumentParser only provides the facility of checking them. Because of that, the parsing logic can be as complex as needed.

How exactly a condition is checked is up to the template because every template provides its own definition for it. A condition definition is a boolean expression of what was found and what was not found on PDF page.

For instance, when processing invoices, 'RightTemplateForPage' might check if the company's name or logo is located on the PDF page and thus, detect if the page corresponds to the template.

Creating a VS Solution

Do not download the latest code as is in a branch because it may be in development. Instead, go to releases and download the latest (pre-)release source code. Find SampleParser.sln there and open it in Visual Studio. It will give a complete example of using PdfDocumentParser that you can modify according to your requirements.

Steps in Visual Studio if building from scratch without SampleParser:

• Create your project.
• Add PdfDocumentParser project to the solution.
• Reference PdfDocumentParser in your project.
• Update nuget packages for the solution.
• Start developing your parser using PdfDocumentParser API.

Enjoy!

History

• 12^th February, 2020: Initial version