Unable to extract text from PDFs

[azeemhusain811]

Describe the bug
I am using this file conversion code snippet here. It is showing "File not found", but the file is there in the same folder.

Error message

Expected behavior
It should work smoothly.

Just reinstalled Haystack from PIP.

pip install Farm-Haystack

[xpatronum]

Hi, @azeemhusain811!
Is uses xpdfreader under the hood.

command = ["pdftotext", "-enc", encoding, str(file_path), "-"]

Are you sure you have pdftotext installed correctly? Could you confirm that running directly from the terminal gives you result you expect?

[azeemhusain811]

Hi @thenewera-ru
Thank you for your response.
I just checked but no luck. It is not working from the terminal also.

I am on windows

[xpatronum]

Hi @thenewera-ru
Thank you for your response.
I have just checked but no luck. It is not working from the terminal also.

I am on windows

It looks like you don't have pdftotext installed. Please install it first here. Then reload your machine in order for Windows to be able to see pdftotext in PATH system variable.

[azeemhusain811]

Hi @thenewera-ru,
It seems like there is some issue with pdftotext only, tried downloading from PyPi.
I will also try to install from the link which you mentioned, but an alternative way could be to use PyPDF2.

[azeemhusain811]

There was something wrong with pdftotext. After going through pdftotext's documentation, I found some dependency.

Install Poppler first: conda install -c conda-forge poppler
then Install pdftotext: pip install pdftotext

Reference: jalan/pdftotext#16 (comment)

It worked for me.

The solution is for Windows users only.

@tholor please have a look, if we can add it somewhere in the documentation.

[tholor]

Thanks for reporting your solution here @azeemhusain811 .
We could add this in the error message here. We already have advice for Linux + MacOs. We could add one line for Windows.
Are you maybe interested in creating a pull request with these changes?

[azeemhusain811]

Hi @tholor,
I am pretty much occupied nowadays with some other stuff.
I will definitely fix it whenever I will be available.

Thanks for your quick response, and sorry for responding late. 😄