Arcana.FileParser.PDF behaviour (Arcana v1.3.3)

Behaviour for PDF parsing providers.

Arcana accepts any module that implements this behaviour for PDF text extraction. The built-in implementation uses poppler's pdftotext command.

Configuration

Configure your PDF parser in config.exs:

# Default: poppler's pdftotext
config :arcana, pdf_parser: :poppler

# Custom module implementing this behaviour
config :arcana, pdf_parser: MyApp.PDFParser
config :arcana, pdf_parser: {MyApp.PDFParser, some_option: "value"}

Implementing a Custom PDF Parser

Create a module that implements this behaviour:

defmodule MyApp.PDFParser do
  @behaviour Arcana.FileParser.PDF

  @impl true
  def parse(path, opts) when is_binary(path) do
    # Parse PDF at file path
    {:ok, extracted_text}
  end

  # Optional: handle binary content directly
  def parse(binary, opts) when is_binary(binary) do
    # Parse PDF binary content
    {:ok, extracted_text}
  end
end

Then configure:

config :arcana, pdf_parser: {MyApp.PDFParser, some_option: "value"}

Summary

Callbacks

parse(path_or_binary, opts)

Parses a PDF and extracts text content.

Functions

parse(arg, path_or_binary, call_opts \\ [])

Parses a PDF using the configured parser.

supports_binary?(arg)

Checks if the given parser module supports binary input.

Callbacks

parse(path_or_binary, opts)

@callback parse(path_or_binary :: binary(), opts :: keyword()) ::
  {:ok, String.t()} | {:error, term()}

Parses a PDF and extracts text content.

The first argument can be either:

A file path (string) - the implementation reads the file
Binary content - the implementation parses directly

Returns {:ok, text} on success, or {:error, reason} on failure.

Options

Options are implementation-specific. The default Poppler implementation supports:

:layout - Preserve original layout (default: true)

Functions

parse(arg, path_or_binary, call_opts \\ [])

Parses a PDF using the configured parser.

The parser is a {module, opts} tuple where module implements this behaviour.

supports_binary?(arg)

Checks if the given parser module supports binary input.

Some parsers (like Poppler) require a file path and don't support parsing binary content directly.