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I've been looking around the interwebs for a while now for a PDF parser that actually works on android. I've tried quiet a few java libraries already but they all seem to crash when running on Android.

Can anyone that has successfully parsed PDFs in Android please recommend a library to use?

Mark D
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    Which libraries did you try - it would be nice if you list them and said what went wrong, give repliers a chance. – mP. Jan 23 '11 at 12:07
  • It would be great if you described your final goal, such as "extract text", or "extract images" or "render the PDF" or ... . This would probably simplify answering. – Eugene Mayevski 'Callback Jan 23 '11 at 14:07

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One of the best Java library to work with PDF is iText, and I see there is its clone to work under Androind - iText PDF For Android, it unsupports some Classes/Methods (but I've found no list of such). If no other options will be suggested, then probably worth to try that one.

UPDATE: Qoppa Software is working on Androind PDF Solution, probably it won't be free, but they look for use cases, so you can contact them and ask about status and any other information.
I've found that information reading related discussion here, maybe information there will be interesting for you too.

Excel1
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Maxym
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  • The problem with iText is that it is really for creating PDFs, not reading them. I'm not sure it even supports PDF text extraction :/ – Mark D Jan 23 '11 at 12:31
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To use simple PDF parser without Format then one can try for PDFBox.zip.. http://pdfbox.apache.org/download.html#pdfbox

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    Not sure if anyone has gotten PDFBox to work on Android, but their method for extracting text from PDF's (shown in this [example script](https://svn.apache.org/viewvc/pdfbox/trunk/examples/src/main/java/org/apache/pdfbox/examples/ant/PDFToTextTask.java?view=markup)) requires the `java.awt.geom` library for some reason, and this standard Java library is **not** included in Android OS. – solarbabies Jun 11 '16 at 08:11
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Technoracle Advanced Systems is rumoured to be building something like this for displaying PDF forms on mobile. I saw a demo about 2 months ago and it appears they can parse PDF forms and render them on Android, iOS, Windows Mobile et al on the fly. Not sure if it is open source or not.

Dave Clemmer
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