Arabic pdf could not be read?

saidbakr

Hi,
I use XAMPP for Linux on Ubuntu 11.10. I have some pdf files in Arabic - one of them is attached to this thread - the text content of this file could not be read.

I used some classes and scripts that succeeded in read English pdf files, but they failed to read those Arabic pdf files.

Another strange thing happens, I could able to run pdftotext command from terminal, but using shell_exec('pdftotext') does not output anything!

Please, I need any help or suggestion to solve this problem.

johanafm

saidbakr;10992162 wrote:
I used some classes and scripts that succeeded in read English pdf files, but they failed to read those Arabic pdf files.

Did those scripts able to handle whatever character sets was used for the PDF?

saidbakr;10992162 wrote:
Another strange thing happens, I could able to run pdftotext command from terminal, but using shell_exec('pdftotext') does not output anything!

Not strange at all. First off, you'd need

shell_exec('pdftotext ' . escapeshellarg($filename))

And then, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdftotext

$ pdftotext file.pdf

This usage produces a text file with the same name as the input file.

which to me seems to indicate that there will be no output. As far as I've understood things, you cannot redirect file output to stdout (only the other way around). This means that after you execute the shell command, use file_get_contents() on the newly created .txt file.

saidbakr

johanafm;10992278 wrote:
Did those scripts able to handle whatever character sets was used for the PDF?

Not strange at all. First off, you'd need
shell_exec('pdftotext ' . escapeshellarg($filename))
And then, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdftotext

which to me seems to indicate that there will be no output. As far as I've understood things, you cannot redirect file output to stdout (only the other way around). This means that after you execute the shell command, use file_get_contents() on the newly created .txt file.

I think something like:
echo shell_exec("/usr/bin/pdftotext $path/1694.pdf $path/1694php.pdf 2>&1"); works!