On 6/6/07, coelho coelho <conta001 / mailinator.com> wrote:
> I am trying to use the rpdf2text library, does anyone have any example
> on how to use properly?  http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/rpdf2txt/

this is taken from bin/rpdf2txt (comments added for your benefit;)

<snip>
# create a parser-instance, with the pdf-content as its first argument.
# The second argument is the encoding you want the resulting String to
# have. Note: if you need utf8, I recommend the character-encoding
# library by Nikolai Weibull

parser = Rpdf2txt::Parser.new(File.read(ARGV[0]), 'utf8')

outstream = STDOUT
if(ARGV.size == 2)
  outstream = File.open(ARGV[1], 'w')
end

# create a callback handler (If you roll your own, be sure to include
# Rpdf2txt::DefaultHandler). outstream needs to respond to :<<

handler = Rpdf2txt::ColumnHandler.new(outstream, padding)
parser.extract_text(handler)
</snip>

There have recently been a couple of major improvements in how rpdf2txt
positions characters. However, there's no official release for that yet.
Since you're just starting out, I would recommend using a daily build
from http://download.ywesee.com/rpdf2txt/rpdf2txt-daily.tar.bz2,
or download rpdf2txt via git/cogito:

cg-clone http://scm.ywesee.com/rpdf2txt

Changelog: http://scm.ywesee.com/?p=rpdf2txt;a=summary

hth,
let me know if it works for you

Hannes

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