File APIs for Word/Excel/PowerPoint/PDF

  PDFs look straightforward until you need to extract something from them. A page that appears to contain normal paragraphs and tables may internally be made up of positioned glyphs, embedded images, drawing commands, and metadata objects. As a result, reliable PDF parsing usually requires more than simply “reading the file.” In a typical Java application, PDF parsing may involve several separate tasks: Loading the document and checking that it can be processed Extracting text page by page Detecting and reading tables Exporting embedded images Reading document metadata This guide shows how to handle each task with Java. The examples are intentionally separated so that you can use only the parts your project needs or combine them into a larger document-processing pipeline. 1. Install the Required Library The examples below use Spire.PDF for Java because it provides dedicated APIs for text, table, image, and metadata extraction. For a Maven project, add the e-iceblue repository and d...