Pdfsink

Ruby wrapper for pdfsink-rs, a fast pure-Rust PDF extraction tool. Extract text, words, page objects, tables, hyperlinks, and regex matches from PDFs — without a Python runtime.

The gem shells out to the bundled pdfsink-rs binary and parses its JSON output, so there is nothing to load into your Ruby process and no FFI.

Requirements

  • Ruby >= 3.2
  • For source installs only: a Rust toolchain (cargo) to compile the binary. Precompiled platform gems bundle the binary and need no toolchain.

Installation

# Gemfile
gem "pdfsink"

bundle install
# or
gem install pdfsink

On supported platforms (x86_64-linux, aarch64-linux, x86_64-darwin, arm64-darwin) a precompiled gem ships the binary. Elsewhere the source gem compiles it on install via cargo install pdfsink-rs.

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/AccountAim/pdfsink-ruby
cd pdfsink-ruby
bundle install
bundle exec rake cargo:build   # compiles the binary into lib/pdfsink/
bundle exec rspec

To point the gem at a binary you built elsewhere, set PDFSINK_BIN:

export PDFSINK_BIN=/path/to/pdfsink-rs

Usage

Open a document

doc = Pdfsink.open("report.pdf")
doc.page_count        # => 12
doc.pages             # => [#<Pdfsink::Page number=1 612.0x792.0>, ...]
doc.each_page { |page| puts page.extract_text }

Extract text

page = doc.page(1)
page.extract_text     # => "Quarterly Report\n..."

# One-shot, without holding a Document:
Pdfsink.extract_text("report.pdf", page: 1)

Words with positions

page.extract_words
# => [{"text" => "Quarterly", "x0" => 72.0, "top" => 90.1, ...}, ...]

Page objects

page.object_counts    # => {"chars" => 812, "lines" => 14, "rects" => 3, ...}
page.objects          # => {"chars" => [...], "lines" => [...], ...}

Tables

page.tables                      # default strategy ("lines")
page.tables(strategy: :text)     # infer from text alignment
# => [["Name", "Age", "City"], ["Alice", "31", "Oakland"], ...]

Strategies: :lines, :lines_strict, :text, :explicit (see Pdfsink::TableStrategy).

page.links
# => [{"uri" => "https://example.com", "x0" => 72.0, ...}]

page.search(/total:\s*\$\d+/i)
# => [{"text" => "Total: $420", "x0" => ..., ...}]

Binary version

Pdfsink.version   # => "0.2.8"

Rails Integration

# config/application.rb (or an initializer)
config.pdfsink.default_table_strategy = :text
config.pdfsink.binary_path = Rails.root.join("bin/pdfsink-rs").to_s

Configuration

Pdfsink.configure do |config|
  config.default_table_strategy = :text   # used when Page#tables gets no strategy
end

The binary is located in this order:

  1. PDFSINK_BIN environment variable
  2. lib/pdfsink/pdfsink-rs inside the gem (bundled / built)
  3. ext/pdfsink/bin/pdfsink-rs (dev location)
  4. pdfsink-rs on PATH

Development

bundle install
bundle exec rake cargo:build
bundle exec rspec

License

MIT — see LICENSE.