[NewDimension]

I prefer something I can install locally (doesn't need to be open source). I'm trying to extract text from a PDF at a certain position, the PDF is indeed text not an image so OCR isn't strictly needed.

The goal is to draw a box using GUI, then use those coordinates to extract text from several homogeneous pages.

I also have a different goal of trying to interpret structure of a PDF that has visual structure (headers, sections and subsections all numbered). But that seems to lend itself to some sort of text parsing.

[severine]

I also have a different goal of trying to interpret structure of a PDF that has visual structure (headers, sections and subsections all numbered). But that seems to lend itself to some sort of text parsing.

Some reading here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53219016/detecting-secti...

[jjohansson]

PDFTron provides an SDK and isn't really meant as a plug-and-play end-user application. But it can accomplish what you're looking for.

Here's how to extract text from a PDF based on coordinates (this explains how to do it on web, but it's also possible using other platforms):

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pdfnet-webviewer/h2W3VksbQUI...

Here's how to extract a PDF's logical structure:

https://www.pdftron.com/documentation/samples/#logicalstruct...