PDFdigest: an Adaptable Layout-Aware PDF-to-XML Textual Content Extractor for Scientific Articles

The availability of automated approaches and tools to extract structured textual content from PDF articles is essential to enable scientific text mining. This paper describes and evaluates the PDFdigest tool, a PDF-to-XML textual content extraction system specially designed to extract scientific articles' headings and logical structure (title, authors, abstract,...) and its textual content. The extractor deals with both text-based and image-based PDF articles using custom rule-based algorithms implemented with existing state-of-the-art open-source tools for both PDF-to-HTML conversion and image-based PDF Optical Character Recognition.