Creating xls from PDF with tables using csharp

Question

Hi All The scenario is I want to convert a PDF file to an xls file. The PDF contains texts and table structures. It is known that the pdf doesn't have the concept of tables or do have any tags relating to those which may help to figure out that the certain piece of text is in table. Using ITextSharp we can fetch out individual text and its position information but how to get it with the table structure as the final outcome desired is an excel file. Even if I retrieved text with position information again placing it in a datatable or to an intermediate html file doesn't seems easy. Please help me find a suitable solution such as I can create a similar structure that of a PDF file to an xls file. The PDF in this case doesn't have any images it is only texts and in some cases tables and text in it. Any help would be really helping.

Vinay Sulanki · Answer

@Hemanth Presently I am having the text and its positioning information or say its coordinates using iTextSharp. And my PDF is not of a generic type. It is of a certain format or say a structure and my pdf does only contain text and tables and no images. Thanks for replying.

Hemant Kumar · Answer

I've worked with PDF quite a bit over the years and in my experience this kind of conversion is pointless unless you know exactly how the PDF document is structured. PDF is a layout format; the data in it is optimized for displaying and printing content not for data extraction. Sure you could extract text from a PDF using some library but you'll have a hard time figuring out the actual order of the text. To figure that out you'd have to render the document and determine the position of each piece of text. As far as I know only commercial PDF libs support this kind of extraction. OpenOffice has a PDF import extension which you can use to convert to ODF format. http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Pdf_Import_Extension Then you can port it over to Excel however you like (i.e. open it in OpenOffice Calc and save as Excel)

Vinay Sulanki · Answer

@Vidya it is well known about the PDF that it doesn't holds any table like information in it. But it certainly haves re like tags which may be depicting the rectangular area in it. I was wondering how the commercial softwares do convert the pdf to xls but not seems that easy using our free/open source libraries. I think I have to dig more into it further. Thanks for replying.

Tulasi · Answer

Hi The problem is that the PDF probably does not retain any spreadsheet type structure - its just text drawn on a page. So you are unlikely to happy with the results unless its a really simple page. http://forums.asp.net/t/1286471.aspx

Vinay Sulanki · Answer

@Hemanth my intention is to convert PDF to xls. Not from xls to pdf.

Hemant Kumar · Answer

Download sautinSoft dll which provide easy method to convert xls to pdf SautinSoft Then write this code to convert SautinSoft . XlsToPdf xtop = new SautinSoft . XlsToPdf (); byte [] pdfBytes = null ; int i = xtop . ConvertBytes ( FileUpload1 . FileBytes  ref pdfBytes ); //show PDF if ( pdfBytes != null ) { Response . Buffer = true ; Response . Clear (); Response . ContentType = application/PDF ; Response . BinaryWrite ( pdfBytes ); Response . Flush (); Response . End (); }