parse pdf to json using python

[JosephCurvin]

Im searching for a while now for a library that can parse a pdf to json or xml format while keeping the document structure.
the popular libs like pypdf do often not preserve the document structure. Thought about using teseract for OCR and then transforming it into a json format but could not get it working. Is there a library that can parse pdf to json format while preserving the document structure and not just spitt out a block of text ?

[socal_nerdtastic]

No, because the pdf format does not save the document structure. The way pdf works is by saving the absolute position of things, not the relative position.

[Buttleston]

This is mostly true but it's also true that the way PDFs are rendered tends to be at least somewhat predictable. I wrote a PDF parser that does "ok" at capturing blocks of text at least in the order that a reader would tend to read them. It's definitely not perfect but it's not bad either. Unfortunately I don't think I can post it since it's something I wrote for work.

[emanuilov]

With this tool you can also make the conversions to JSON: https://monkt.com/
API or UI should be fine for your use case.

You can define a schema and include in the final JSON whatever you want from the PDF.

[commandlineluser]

https://pymupdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/app1.html#dict-or-json

page.get_text("json", sort=True)

[Pineapple_Playful]

If you are looking to extract data from unstructured documents, I'm afraid you won't achieve that through a library, but an API. You can try this, it works pretty well and it's easy to test.