Overview

This node provides utilities to inspect and split PDF files using pure npm packages. It supports three main operations: Inspect, Inspect and Split, and Split. The Inspect operation analyzes the PDF structure to determine if it is vectorial (text-based) by checking the text length against a threshold. The Inspect and Split operation inspects the PDF and splits it into individual pages only if it is not vectorial. The Split operation splits a multi-page PDF into individual pages regardless of its content. This node is useful for workflows that need to analyze PDF content type or process multi-page PDFs by splitting them into single pages for further handling.

Use Case Examples

1. Inspect a PDF to check if it is text-based or image-based before deciding further processing.
2. Automatically split scanned (non-vectorial) PDFs into individual pages while leaving text-based PDFs intact.
3. Split any multi-page PDF into separate single-page PDFs for individual processing or storage.

Properties

Output

JSON

• pageCount - Total number of pages in the PDF (from Inspect and Inspect and Split operations).
• isMultiPage - Boolean indicating if the PDF has more than one page (from Inspect and Inspect and Split operations).
• isVectorial - Boolean indicating if the PDF is considered vectorial (text-based) based on the text threshold (from Inspect and Inspect and Split operations).
• textLength - Length of the extracted text from the first page (from Inspect and Inspect and Split operations).
• firstPageText - Extracted text snippet (first 200 characters) from the first page (from Inspect and Inspect and Split operations).
• pageNumber - Page number of the split PDF page (from Split and Inspect and Split operations).
• originalFileName - Original file name of the PDF being processed (from Split and Inspect and Split operations).
• error - Error message if the operation fails and continueOnFail is enabled.

Dependencies

• pdfjs-dist
• pdf-lib

Troubleshooting

• Ensure the input binary property contains a valid PDF file; otherwise, the node will throw an error.
• If the PDF is encrypted or corrupted, the inspection or splitting may fail with an error message indicating failure to inspect or split PDF.
• Set the Text Threshold appropriately; a very low threshold might misclassify image-based PDFs as vectorial, and a very high threshold might misclassify text-based PDFs as non-vectorial.
• If the node is set to continue on fail, errors will be output as JSON with an error message property.

Links

• pdfjs-dist - Library used for PDF inspection and text extraction.
• pdf-lib - Library used for splitting PDF documents into individual pages.