plaintext

This gem wraps command line tools to extract plain text from typical files such as

• PDF
• RTF
• MS Office
  • Word (doc, docx)
  • Excel (xsl, xslx)
  • PowerPoint (ppt, pptx)
• OpenOffice + Libre
  • Presentation
  • Text
  • Spreadsheet
• Image files (png, jpeg, tiff), such as screenshots and scanned documents, through character recognition (OCR)
• Plaintext (txt)
• Comma-separated values (csv)

This gem bases on work by Jens Krämer / Planio, who originally provided it as a patch for Redmine. Now, it is a collaborative effort of both project management software providers Planio and OpenProject as both systems tackle the identical challenge to extract plain text from attachment files.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'plaintext'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install plaintext

In a Rails application save plaintext.yml.example in config/plaintext.yml and overwrite the settings to your needs.

Then load that configuration file in an initializer. Add the following lines to config/initializers/plaintext.rb:

path = Rails.root.join 'config', 'plaintext.yml'
if File.file?(path)
  config = File.read(path)
  Plaintext::Configuration.load(config)
end

Please overwrite Plaintext::Configuration.load.

On linux the default configuration should work. However, make sure that the following packages are installed

$ apt-get install catdoc unrtf poppler-utils tesseract-ocr

On Mac things are still not complete. Please help us to have the same capabilities as under Linux. Right now we cannot extract text from presentation and spreadsheets.

Please use homebrew to install the missing command line tools.

$ brew install unrtf poppler tesseract

The plaintext.yml should look like this:

pdftotext:
  - /usr/local/bin/pdftotext
  - -enc
  - UTF-8
  - __FILE__
  - '-'

unrtf:
  - /usr/local/bin/unrtf
  - --text
  - __FILE__

tesseract:
  - /usr/local/bin/tesseract
  - __FILE__
  - stdout

catdoc:
  - /usr/bin/textutil
  - -convert
  - txt
  - -stdout
  - __FILE__

# `file` is of type File.
# `content_type` is a String.
fulltext = Plaintext::Resolver.new(file, content_type).text

To limit the number of bytes returned (default is 4MB), set the max_plaintext_bytes property on the resolver instance before calling text.

The plaintext gem is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with the plugin. If not, see www.gnu.org/licenses.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/planio-gmbh/plaintext.