PDF returns no text, tables, or anything

[toakleyy]

I have used pdfplumber with success on a separate PDF, but now when I try the same function on this new PDF I get absolutely nothing. I'm simply trying to extract text. See attached PDF here (I have blocked out personal info, but it is not blocked out when I try to plumb it) -
RJ PDF markup.pdf

Some code I am using that isn't working:
`

import pdfplumber
    
file = "localfilename"

with pdfplumber.open(file) as _pdf:
    pages = _pdf.pages

    for _i_, page in enumerate(pages):
        text = page.extract_text()
        print(f'page {_i_}')
        print(text)`

My output looks like this:
page 0

page 1

page 2

So it scans each page, but doesn't actually come up with any text.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[jsvine]

Hi @toakleyy, and thanks for your interest in this library. From what you've shared, it appears that your PDF is a scanned document, not a born-digital PDF. (A quick way to test this: Can you select / copy / paste any text within the document?) If that's the case, you'll first want to run optical character recognition on the PDF. Then you can extract the OCR-detected text with pdfplumber.

[toakleyy]

Thanks, I will try this. Can you recommend an OCR library for Python?

[jsvine]

The most established open-source OCR tool is probably Tesseract, though its quality can be a bit spotty. But certainly worth trying as a first option. OCRMyPDF is a Tesseract-based Python project that works both via the command line and as a Python library. I've used it with success in the past. Another Python- and Tesseract-based option is PyTesseract library, which I've also found to work well.