How to extract text from a PDF file and what are the challenges faced during extraction?

To extract text from a PDF file, we can use PyPDF2 library in NLP to extract all types of text from a PDF file. The below snippet shows how to implement the same in Python.

From the snippet, it can be seen that ‘US_Declaration.pdf’ has been opened and it needs to be read by using PdfFileReader() command. Also using numPages, we can get to know the total number of pages present in the file.

Texts get often difficult to extract when the PDF file is not created from Word file. They are more of a scanned images in which it becomes difficult to extract the text using this library. For such files, much specialized softwares are used