objective c - How can I get the text from PDF page?

Question

How can I get the text from PDF page in Objective-C?

Answer 1

First of all - give up on any "quick & dirty" solution for parsing PDF - it will fail miserably. My colleague spent a lot of time trying to solve this problem correctly in iOS. His top 3 (by quality, descending) options:

1. muPDF (http://www.mupdf.com/) Great library - it will do extraction fine. It is licensed under GPL though which is a show stopper for our proprietary application.
2. Homemade solution based on the CGPDFScanner. You can find a short description of how to do this here . The main problem of this approach is SDK itself - Apple's API for PDF is severely (and deliberately I suspect) limited. For example you'll have to lay out extracted text blocks in 2D space because PDF doesn't guarantee that order of drawing matches text flow and iOS SDK is not a bit helpful here.
3. Poppler (http://poppler.freedesktop.org/) is OK but for the text extraction it is a rough equivalent of the second option (with tons of additional dependencies).

There can be more options with Mac OS X but I don't know them.