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Comment by donretag | Hacker News Reader

Hopeflly PDFBox is more stable than Apache Tika. Tika has become bloated with all the different formats that it supports.

Latest version of Tika parser has 44 compile time dependencies: http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.tika/tika-parse...

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> Hopeflly PDFBox is more stable than Apache Tika.

I've had a few issues with Tika (at least one of which turned out to be a PDFBox issue). The mailing lists and bug trackers have been very helpful - down to people fixing bugs or writing me custom code to work around the issue, often in a few hours.

Very impressed, and the atmosphere reminds me of my first few years on the web: people helping each other, before it became so commercialised.

As sigmaml said, Tika uses PDFBox. I would still recommend using PDFBox for text extraction until Tika updates to PDFBox 2.0. The biggest difference I have found with PDFBox 2.0 versus 1.x is that there are significantly fewer blank lines in the 2.0 output. This helps with readability and further processing on the output such as detecting headings, paragraphs, etc.

The scope of Tika is different and wide. For the PDF subset, Tika uses PDFBox to parse and extract data from the document.

I have never noticed that. Perhaps it is because I never used Tika directly, but as a dependency from other projects such as Nutch.

I realize the scope is different, which is why I mentioned that Tika supports more formats.

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