Want to extract Invoice PDF Data

Question

Hi I want to extract Invoice PDF data and stored data in sql database table with in a proper field.

Nilesh Shah · Answer

You can use Mustang for this which is a standard for transferring invoice data in a PDF file as an XML attachment which can be easily read and interpreted by programs. http://www.mustangproject.org/

Lisa White · Answer

Hi Please refer to below link for extracting data from PDF: https://www.e-iceblue.com/Tutorials/Spire.PDF/Spire.PDF-Program-Guide/How-to-Extract-Text-from-PDF-Document-with-C-/VB.NET.html

Amin Dodin · Answer

The suitable solution depends on the nature of your invoices. If they have an arbitrary structure where they can come from any source and do not have any known locations for the data you want to extract you can simply open the PDF pages as images and perform OCR to get the data. To load the PDF pages you could use ImageMagick which uses Ghostscript to handle PDF then use a free OCR engine such as Tessnet. Another option is to use a professional library like LEADTOOLS (https://www.leadtools.com/sdk/recognition-imaging) that supports both document and image PDF and has OCR features. (Disclaimer: I work for the company that created this library). The code to load a PDF page as image and OCR it looks like this: IOcrEngine _ocrEngine; _ocrEngine = OcrEngineManager.CreateEngine(OcrEngineType.Advantage false ); _ocrEngine.Startup( null  null  null  null ); IOcrDocument ocrDoc = _ocrEngine.DocumentManager.CreateDocument(); ocrDoc.Pages.AddPage(pdfFileName null ); ocrDoc.Pages[0].Recognize( null ); // Save the result to a memory stream as plain text System.IO.MemoryStream OcrResultStream = new System.IO.MemoryStream(); ocrDoc.Save(OcrResultStream Leadtools.Forms.DocumentWriters.DocumentFormat.Text null ); string txtResult = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(OcrResultStream.ToArray()); _ocrEngine.Shutdown(); The toolkit also has features for extracting text without OCR if the file has correct text encoding. If the invoices have a known structure you could use Forms Recognition to obtain the data in an ordered fashion as fields instead of just free text. For details see https://www.leadtools.com/sdk/forms