Introduction
FME’s Adobe Geospatial PDF Reader can extract much information from PDF documents. It can read imagery, rasters, vector data, text, spatial information, and attributes.
However, extracting information from a PDF document can be complex. One complication with PDFs is that they are a document format. PDF document contents can vary greatly: you may have information spread across many pages, maps (basically embedded pictures), or even a CAD drawing with many lines scattered throughout. So it’s hard to know how to read a PDF before you see it and know what you need to extract. Sometimes you may be concerned about where information is on the PDF page; other times, you may simply want to extract the content, and the location doesn’t matter.
A PDF document in FME Data Inspector (left); the same PDF document in Adobe PDF Reader (right)
PDF Reader Options
The PDF Reader has many options for extracting data. Your PDF may contain:
- Vector or Raster map data
- Pages and pages of Text
- Headers, Footers, Tables and more
The main choice is about whether to read the PDF as spatial or non-spatial (tabular). In other words, does the location of each feature on the page matter, or are you simply concerned about the page as a whole? Additionally, you can select both Spatial and Non-Spatial (tabular) PDF reader options at the same time.
Detailed information about the Spatial parameter options is in the documentation.
The Spatial section refers to the fact that the PDF document may contain information with a particular location on the page, which may translate to a specific location on Earth if the PDF document defines a coordinate system or coordinate systems. PDF documents can contain multiple coordinate systems per page.
To display PDF data in the FME Data Inspector with a background map, set Coordinate Units to Geospatial (if possible). It’s only possible to display PDF data with a background map in FME Data Inspector if a coordinate system exists.
Detailed information about the Non-Spatial parameter options is in the documentation.
If your PDF document contains tabular data, you can extract metadata and text, and even rasterize the entire PDF page. The Non-Spatial Metadata parameter can extract information such as attributes or document details, including the creation date.
PDF Reading Articles
Reading Simple PDF and Map Content
This article covers how to read a simple PDF with common report content, how to inspect and extract the content of PDF map frames, and how to read features within a frame described with page points and geospatial coordinates.
Creating PDF Cartographic Output
Learn how to read, style, and sort feature types, and then set up a page layout for output to a PDF file.
Data Attribution
The data used here originates from OpenStreetMap