PDFlib Text Extraction Toolkit (TET) Manual

8 TET Markup Language (TETML)
8.1 Creating TETML
As an alternative to supplying the contents of a PDF document via a programming interface,
TET can create XML output which represents the same information. We refer to
the XML output created by TET as TET Markup Language (TETML). TETML contains the
text content of the PDF pages plus optional information such as text position, font, font
size, etc. If TET detects table-like structures on the page the tables will be expressed in
TETML as a hierarchy of table, row, and cell elements. Note that table information is not
available via the TET programming interface, but only through TETML. TETML also contains
information about images and colorspaces.
You can convert PDF documents to TETML with the TET command-line tool or the
TET library. In both cases there are various options available for controlling details of
TETML generation.
Creating TETML with the TET command-line tool. Using the TET command-line tool
you can generate TETML output with the --tetml option. The following command will
create a TETML output document file.tetml:
tet --tetml word file.pdf
You can use various options to convert only some pages of the document, supply processing
options, etc. Refer to Section 2.1, »Command-Line Options«, page 15, for more details.
Creating TETML with the TET library. Using a simple sequence of API calls you can generate
TETML output with the TET library. The tetml sample program demonstrates the
canonical sequence for programmatically generating TETML. This sample program is
available in all supported language bindings.
TETML output can be generated on a disk file or in memory. The generated TETML
stream can be parsed into a XML tree using the XML support provided by most modern
programming languages. Processing the TETML tree is also demonstrated in the tetml
sample programs.
What’s included in TETML? TETML output is encoded in UTF-8 (on zSeries with USS or
MVS: EBCDIC-UTF-8, see www.unicode.org/reports/tr16), and includes the following information:
> general document information and metadata
> text contents of each page (words or paragraph)
> glyph information (font name, size, coordinates)
> structure information, e.g. tables
> information about placed images on the page
> resource information, i.e. fonts, colorspaces, and images
> error messages if an exception occurred during PDF processing
Various elements and attributes in TETML are optional. See Section 8.2, »Controlling
TETML Details«, page 92, for details.
8.1 Creating TETML 89