How to convert PDF file into .XLS format

Question

I want to convert PDF file into .XLS format in ASP.NET using C#. Is it possible to do like this?

Answer 1

It's not clear to me what you're exactly trying to achieve, but if I were you, I would split the problem in two:

1. How can I read content from a PDF file? You can find some insights here.
2. How can I create and write to an xls file in C#? There is already a great answer here.

If you ask more specific questions, you'lle be able to get better answers.

Answer 2

You can use PdfSharp library to serve this purpose.

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.IO;
using PdfSharp;
using PdfSharp.Drawing;
using PdfSharp.Pdf;
using PdfSharp.Pdf.IO;
using PdfSharp.Pdf.Advanced; 
namespace WorkOnPdfObjects
{
class Program
{
static void Main()
{
const string filename = "Portable Document Format.pdf";
File.Copy(Path.Combine("../../../../../PDFs/", filename), 
Path.Combine(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory(), filename), true); 
PdfDocument document = PdfReader.Open(filename); 
PdfDictionary dict = new PdfDictionary(document); 
dict.Elements["/S"] = new PdfName("/GoTo"); 
PdfArray array = new PdfArray(document); 
dict.Elements["/D"] = array; 
PdfReference iref = PdfInternals.GetReference(document.Pages[2]); 
array.Elements.Add(iref);
array.Elements.Add(new PdfName("/FitV"));
array.Elements.Add(new PdfInteger(-32768));
document.Internals.AddObject(dict); 
document.Internals.Catalog.Elements["/OpenAction"] = 
PdfInternals.GetReference(dict); 
document.Save(filename);
Process.Start(filename);
}
}
}

I think this should help you.

Answer 3

The solution actually depends on the complexity of PDF document(s) you have. The problem is that some PDF files can be converted with easy by simply writing each text objects one after another following their order inside PDF but this order is not guaranteed to be similar to the visual appearance due to the PDF format design.

There are some options:

• Use iTextSharp (open source) to read PDF and then process each text object from PDF and create CSV output based on it (write each text objects enclosed with quote, separate them by comma, and separate rows by the line break symbol) like in this sample code.

  You may also use the powerful port of Apache PDFBox (Java) to [PDFBox.NET] instead 3 (but it requires IKVM, Java VM implemented in .NET)

• In case of complex PDF documents you may use a specialized commercial solution like ByteScout PDF Extractor SDK designed to extract tables as CSV or XLS from PDF.

// disclosure: I work for ByteScout