Converting pdf to text

I need to create a C# or C++ (MFC) application that converts pdf files to txt. I need not only to convert, but remove headers, footers, some garbage characters on the left margin etc. Thus the application shold allow the user to set page margins to cut off what is not needed. I actually have already created such an application using xpdf, but it gives me some problems when I am trying to insert custom tags into the extracted text to preserve italics and bold. 开发者_C百科Maybe somebody could suggest something useful?

Thanks.

There are shareware and freeware utilities out there. Try fetching their source code, or perhaps use them the way they are.

A public version of the PDF specification can be found here: Adobe PDF Specification

PDF Shareware readers can be found: PDF Reader source code @ SourceForge

Please look at Podofo. It's a LGPL-licensed library that has many powerful editing features. One of it's examples, txt2pdf IIRC, is a good start: it shows basic text-extraction; From there you can check if pre (in pdf engine) or post (in text) filtering suffices to your goals. I didn't get to use Pdf Hummus, but it's supposed to have these capabilities too, although it's less straightforward.