Extract information from a multiple pdfs PDF file

[Sbhandary]

Hello, I’m looking for assistance in extracting information from PDF files. I’ve over 100 pdf files. The aim is to extract the necessary information and then group it according to the headers. The information in the pdf is not in a tabular format. In the past, I attempted to extract data from tables using tika parser and pdf parser. Because the data in my current PDFs is in a different structure, it is not helping me in understanding how to do it. Each data from the pdf relates to a single point of information and can range from one page to three pages (i.e. 100 PDFs correspond to 100 locations information, and the number of pages in each pdf varies). As i cant upload pdf i am attaching the data in word format. The data in attached is a rough output i am looking for. Please help
Output_Test_SB.xlsx (9.4 KB)

Test_SB.docx (84.0 KB)

[ScottF]

Hi @Sbhandary -

Data extraction from PDFs can definitely be a tricky task. Let me point you to some other threads where this type of analysis is address in more detail.

PDF reader workflow

Hello @davehansen, PDFs are in fact very tricky. First, what kind of PDF are you dealing with? An image-based PDF or a text-based PDF? I assume text-based since you did get some text, but I need to be sure because the path you walk will depend on whether you can select the text in your PDF (high probability of a text-based PDF) or if you can’t select the text in your PDF you will need to OCR it first (the Tess4J node in KNIME handles OCR). As well, you can read text-based PDFs with the PDF Pa…

Unable to read Non-OCR PDFs

Hi, I’m the PDF guy on the forum. I’ve never heard of a non-OCR PDF. What is that exactly? We recently had a PDF extraction event via Data Connect. The slides can be found here . For PDFs, you may also find that the tika parser is better for extraction (but it depends on how/what you want to extract). As well, we did PDF extraction in a Just KNIME It challenge: [image] KNIME Hub [image] Extracting a Table from a PDF – alinebessa Given a text-based PDF document with a table, can you par…

The Data Connect recording that Victor links in the second post might be of particular interest.

[Sbhandary]

HI Scott, Thanks for directing me to the specific links to the workflow. I will look into it and get back in case of any queries.