Hello,
I have just built and installed pdfbox so I could try out its PDF to text
conversion. It seems quite good and very fast, based on the small simple
example I gave it (which was a real technical journal). I am very tempted to
use this to generate text files for all the PDFs that I will be uploading
into my DSpace. These text files are no good at all for rendering but I am
hoping they will enable a full text search of the articles to be done. What
do people think of this approach please?
pdfbox text extraction makes no attempt to create any kind of metadata, it
really is just like doing a string dump of the PDF. Normally Dspace
libraries that make more than just a PDF available make an HTML version
available as well, rather than a text file. The HTML renders reasonably
closely to the PDF. And of course the HTML is what enables the full text
search. I dont see how I can get that with what I have, i.e no HTML, no
metadata files and PDFs that are not OCR'd. So using pdfbox seems to me like
the only way to get full text searching.
My "solution" also has another little quirk. When one finds the article one
is looking for the item page will have the text file as well as the PDF but
should the user select the text file they will be very puzzled as to why it
is so poor and indeed why, given its visual quality, it is even there.
--
Regards,
Andrew M.
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