PDFdigest: an Adaptable Layout-Aware PDF-to-XML Textual Content Extractor for Scientific Articles
Daniel Ferrés, Horacio Saggion, Francesco Ronzano, Álex Bravo · 2018
The availability of automated approaches and tools to extract structured textual content from PDF articles is essential to enable scientific text mining.This paper describes and evaluates the PDFdigest tool, a PDF-to-XML textual content extraction system specially designed to extract scientific articles' headings and logical structure (title, authors, abstract,...) and its textual content.The extractor deals with both text-based and image-based PDF articles using custom rule-based algorithms implemented with existing state-of-the-art open-source tools for both PDF-to-HTML conversion and image-based PDF Optical Character Recognition.