Problem using PDFBox to extract text from PDF documents

[Konstantinos Vasileiou]

Hi all,

I am trying to extract the textual content of PDF files from my Java code. I (am trying to) use PDFBox 0.7.3 and the examples I have found online so far are rather limited. Basically, I did something like this:

  PDDocument doc = null;
		try {
			doc = PDDocument.load("sample.pdf");
			PDFTextStripper stripper = new PDFTextStripper();
			String text=stripper.getText(doc);

		} finally {
			if (doc != null) {
				doc.close();
			}
		}
  

and I get the following exception:

 Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/fontbox/afm/AFMParser
	at org.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDFont.getAFM(PDFont.java:350)
	at org.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDFont.getAverageFontWidthFromAFMFile(PDFont.java:313)
	at org.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDSimpleFont.getAverageFontWidth(PDSimpleFont.java:231)
	at org.pdfbox.util.PDFStreamEngine.showString(PDFStreamEngine.java:276)
	at org.pdfbox.util.operator.ShowTextGlyph.process(ShowTextGlyph.java:80)
	at org.pdfbox.util.PDFStreamEngine.processOperator(PDFStreamEngine.java:452)
	at org.pdfbox.util.PDFStreamEngine.processSubStream(PDFStreamEngine.java:215)
	at org.pdfbox.util.PDFStreamEngine.processStream(PDFStreamEngine.java:174)
	at org.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper.processPage(PDFTextStripper.java:336)
	at org.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper.processPages(PDFTextStripper.java:259)
	at org.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper.writeText(PDFTextStripper.java:216)
	at org.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper.getText(PDFTextStripper.java:149)
	at main.main(main.java:21) 
  

Any suggestions from the more PDFbox-experienced users?

[Ulf Dittmer]

org/fontbox/afm/AFMParser

Do you have that class on your classpath? Maybe PDFBox comes in several jar files.

[Konstantinos Vasileiou]

Ulf Dittmer wrote:

org/fontbox/afm/AFMParser

Do you have that class on your classpath? Maybe PDFBox comes in several jar files.

Yes, you are right. I needed to add the FontBox jar to my build path in order to make it work... Thanks!

[Naresh Kallamadi]

add dependency jar : fontbox-1.3.1  
(mentioned version as per my request)

[Tim Moores]

This topic is now 9 years old, and Konstantinos hasn't posted since 2009, so this is unlikely to help. Nonethelesss I want to point out that nobody should use either version 0.7.3 or 1.3.1 of PDFBox at this point - both have been obsolete for years.

[Campbell Ritchie]

But welcome to the Ranch