PDFx v1.0 - Extract metadata and URLs from PDFs, and download all referenced PDFs

I just released PDFx version 1.0, a Python tool and library to extract metadata and URLs from PDFs, and to automatically download all referenced PDFs. The project is released under the Apache license with the source code on Github!

Features

  • Extract metadata and PDF URLs from a given PDF (file or URL)
  • Download all PDFs referenced in the original PDF
  • Works with local and online pdfs
  • Use as command-line tool or Python package
  • Compatible with Python 2 and 3

Quick Start

Grab a copy of pdfx with easy_install or pip and run it:

$ easy_install -U pdfx
...
$ pdfx <pdf-file-or-url>

Run pdfx -h to see the help output:

$ pdfx -h
usage: pdfx [-h] [-d OUTPUT_DIRECTORY] [-j] [-v] [--debug] [--version] pdf

Get infos and links from a PDF, and optionallydownload all referenced PDFs.
See http://www.metachris.com/pdfx for more information.

positional arguments:
  pdf                   Filename or URL of a PDF file

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -d OUTPUT_DIRECTORY, --download-pdfs OUTPUT_DIRECTORY
                        Download all referenced PDFs into specified directory
  -j, --json            Output infos as json (instead of plain text)
  -v, --verbose         Print all urls (instead of only PDF urls)
  --debug               Output debug infos
  --version             show program's version number and exit

By default pdfx only prints the information. If you add the -d flag, it downloads all referenced PDFs to the specified location:

$ pdfx https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy.pdf -d ./
Document infos:
- CreationDate = D:20150821110623-04'00'
- Creator = LaTeX with hyperref package
- ModDate = D:20150821110805-04'00'
- PTEX.Fullbanner = This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.5-1.40.14 (TeX Live 2013/Debian) kpathsea version 6.1.1
- Pages = 13
- Producer = pdfTeX-1.40.14
- Title = Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice
- Trapped = False

17 PDF URLs:
- http://cr.yp.to/factorization/smoothparts-20040510.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35671.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35529.pdf
- http://cryptome.org/2013/08/spy-budget-fy13.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35514.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35509.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35515.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35533.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35519.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35522.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35513.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35528.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35526.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35517.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35527.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35520.pdf
- http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35551.pdf

Downloading 17 pdfs to './'...
All done!

To do

Reach out to me on Twitter @metachris

References

Python • PDFx
Chris