Read data from a PDF document that does not have an XFA-form

Question

I use iText to read a PDF document containing an XFA form. I convert it to XML, read data from the XML and insert it in a datatbase. But if I dont have an XFA form in the PDF then how I can efficiently read data from the PDF?

Answer 1

It depends on your expectations.

• You can use text extraction to retrieve all the text on a certain page. How you then process the text is up to you. (eg regular expressions)

• You can also opt for using pdf2Data, an iText7 add-on that allows you to match documents against templates. pdf2Data seems like a good fit, since it produces XML files as its output.

More information on pdf2Data can be found here http://itextpdf.com/itext7/pdf2Data