Is it possible to read text from a PDF file with PHP? How?
There may be a free one, or even an OpenSource one, but I've never heard
of it, possibly because they'd have to pay a license to Adobe (Macromedia
this week?) to be legal...
Free (as in beer):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
It's built on top of Ghostscript... which AFAIK does most of the heavy lifting. Several licensing options too.
This doesn't appear to read text from a PDF but, rather, create the PDF from text.
Another, easy way to create PDFs with PHP is to use PDML:
http://pdml.sourceforge.net/
As for reading the text from a PDF, maybe there's some sort of OCR library for PHP out there, but I don't know about it. It'd be a great thing to see, though.
--
Ben Ramsey
http://benramsey.com/