Extract Text

Extract text from files to make them searchable and machine readable.

Once installed and active, this module has the following features:

• The module adds an "extracted text" property where it sets extracted text to media and items.
• When adding a media, the module will automatically extract text from the file and set the text to the media.
• When adding or editing an item, the module will automatically aggregate the media text (in order) and set the text to the item.
• When editing an item or batch editing items, the user can choose to refresh or clear the extracted text.
• When editing a media, the user can choose to refresh or clear the extracted text.
• On the module configuration page, the user can:
• See which extractors are available on their system.
• Disable individual extractors.
• Set individual extractors to only run in the background.

Supported file formats:

• DOC (application/msword)
• DOCX (application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document)
• HTML (text/html)
• ODT (application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text)
• PDF (application/pdf)
• RTF (application/rtf)
• TXT (text/plain)

Images files are supported by tesseract if compiled with the required libraries:

• BMP (image/bmp)
• GIF (image/gif)
• JP2 (image/jp2)
• JPG (image/jpeg)
• PNG (image/png)
• TIFF (image/tiff)
• WEBP (image/webp)

Note that some file extensions or media types may be disallowed in your global settings.

Extractors:

catdoc

Used to extract text from DOC and RTF files. Requires catdoc.

docx2txt

Used to extract text from DOCX files. Requires docx2txt.

filegetcontents

Used to extract text from TXT files. No requirements.

lynx

Used to extract text from HTML files. Requires lynx.

odt2txt

Used to extract text from ODT files. Requires odt2txt.

pdftotext

Used to extract text from PDF files. Requires pdftotext, a part of the poppler-utils package.

tesseract

Used to extract text from image files (OCR). Requires tesseract.

Disabling text extraction

You can disable text extraction for individual extractors in the module config page.

You can disable text extraction for a specific media type by setting the media type alias to null in the "extract_text_extractors" service config in your local configuration file (config/local.config.php). For example, if you want to disable extraction for TXT (text/plain) files, add the following:

'extract_text_extractors' => [
    'aliases' => [
        'text/plain' => null,
    ],
],

Extracting text in the background

Extractors may take a long time to process. Running them in the browser could result in long wait times and server/brower timeouts, especially if done in synchronous batches. For processes that take too long, users have two options to extract text:

• In the item edit page, by selecting "Refresh text (background)".
• In the item browse page, by selecting the "Edit all" batch action (perhaps after making a search).

Both of these options will run text extraction in a background job.

You can set individual extractors to only run in the background on the module config page. Note that extractors can be set to never run in the foreground (see below). These extractors cannot be toggled on/off on the module config page. They are always set to "background only."

You can set an extractor to never run in the foreground using the "extract_text/ background_only" config in your local configuration file (config/local.config.php). For example, if you want to set the pdftotext extractor as background only, add the following:

  'extract_text' => [
      'background_only' => [
          'pdftotext',
      ],
  ],

Note that extractors set as background only will not automatically extract text when adding a media. You will need to extract text using the two options above.

Configuring extractors

Some extractors allow you to configure how they extract text. You can configure them using the "extract_text/options" config in your local configuration file (config/local.config.php). For example, if you want to always skip the first page of PDFs, add the following:

'extract_text' => [
    'options' => [
        'pdftotext' => [
            'f' => 2,
        ],
    ],
],

Another example: if you want to use English and German together for OCR, add the following:

'extract_text' => [
    'options' => [
        'tesseract' => [
            'l' => 'eng+deu',
        ],
    ],
],

The following extractors have configuration options:

filegetcontents

• offset: The offset where the reading starts (default 0)
• maxlen: Maximum length of data read (default null)

pdftotext

• f: First page to convert (default null)
• l: Last page to convert (default null)

tesseract

• l: Language/script (default 'eng')
• psm: Page segmentation mode (default 3)
• oem: OCR Engine mode (default 3)

See the tesseract manual for more info.

Copyright

ExtractText is Copyright © 2019-present Corporation for Digital Scholarship, Vienna, Virginia, USA http://digitalscholar.org

The Corporation for Digital Scholarship distributes the Omeka source code under the GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPLv3). The full text of this license is given in the license file.

The Omeka name is a registered trademark of the Corporation for Digital Scholarship.

Third-party copyright in this distribution is noted where applicable.

All rights not expressly granted are reserved.