Getting Started

Here’s how to quickly get started with applying Burdoc to your files.

Prerequisites

More detailed information on running Burdoc can be found here - Docs

Prerequisites

• Python >= 3.8

ML Prerequisites

The transformer-based table detection use by Burdoc by default can be quite slow on CPU, often taking several seconds per page, you’ll see a large performance increase by running it on a GPU. To avoid messing around with package versions after the fact, it’s generally better to install GPU drivers and GPU accelerated versions of PyTorch first if available.

• Cuda

• PyTorch

Installation

To install burdoc from pip

pip install burdoc

To build it directly from source

git clone https://github.com/jennis0/burdoc
cd burdoc
pip install .

Developer Install

To reproduce the development environment for running builds, tests, etc. use

pip install burdoc[dev]

or

git clone https://github.com/jennis0/burdoc
cd burdoc
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Usage

Burdoc can be used as a library or directly from the command line depending on your usecase.

Command Line

usage: burdoc [-h] [--pages PAGES] [--html] [--detailed] [--no-ml-tables] [--images] [--single-threaded] [--profile] [--debug] in_file [out_file]

positional arguments:
  in_file            Path to the PDF file you want to parse
  out_file           Path to file to write output to. Defaults to [in-file-stem].json/[in-file-stem].html

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  --pages PAGES      List of pages to process. Accepts comma separated list and ranges specified with '-'
  --html             Output a simple HTML representation of the document, rather than the JSON content.
  --detailed         Include BoundingBoxes and font statistics in the output to aid onward processing
  --no-ml-tables     Turn off ML table finding. Defaults to False.
  --images           Extract images from PDF and store in output. This can lead to very large output JSON files.Default is False
  --single-threaded  Force Burdoc to run in single-threaded mode. Default to off
  --profile          Dump timing information at end of processing
  --debug            Dump debug messages to log

Library

from burdoc import BurdocParser

parser = BurdocParser(
 detailed: bool = False, # Include detailed information such as font statistics and bounding boxes in the output
 skip_ml_table_finding: bool = False, # Whether to use ML table finding algorithms
 ignore_images: bool = False, # Don’t extract any images from the document. Much faster but prone to errors if images used as layout elements 
 max_threads: int | None = None, # Maximum number of threads to run. Set to None to use default system limits or 1 to force single-threaded mode. Defaults to None 
 log_level: int = 20, #  Defaults to logging.INFO 
 show_pages: bool = False # Draw each page as it’s extracted with extraction information laid on top. Primarily for debugging. Defaults to False.
)
content = parser.read('file.pdf')