text extraction hangs on MacOS 10.14

[devcsrj]

I am trying to use pdfbox, with this vanilla snippet:

converter = pdfbox.PDFBox()
converter.extract_text(
    input_path=str(pdf.absolute()),
    output_path=str(txt.absolute()))

But it becomes stuck. I debugged the stack tree, and it hangs at this line:

I confirmed that a Java process is spawned:

➜ jps
5416 Jps
5385
329    <-- spawned process

But it is just stuck there.

Running the cached jar by python-pdfbox in the terminal works:

java -jar pdfbox-app-2.0.17.jar ExtractText '/Users/devcsrj/Projects/devcsrj/klerk/dist/17/SENATE/regular-1/journal-28.pdf' '/Users/devcsrj/Projects/devcsrj/klerk/dist/17/SENATE/regular-1/journal-28.txt'

So I am no longer sure what's going on. Thoughts?

---

Environment

Python

python-pdfbox = "==0.1.7"
python_version = "3.7"

Java

openjdk version "1.8.0_222"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_222-20190711112007.graal.jdk8u-src-tar-gz-b08)
OpenJDK 64-Bit GraalVM CE 19.2.0 (build 25.222-b08-jvmci-19.2-b02, mixed mode)

OS

macOS Mojave 10.14.4

[adarsa]

I have the same issue. Did you find a solution to this?

[devcsrj]

@adarsa Not really no. I ended up abandoning pdfbox altogether, and used tesseract to extract text instead.

[lebedov]

Does this occur with all PDFs, or only with some? If the latter, can you attach it to this issue?

[devcsrj]

@lebedov I haven't had the chance to try it on other PDFs, but as for the file I am using in the screenshot, it is this one.

[lebedov]

I can't reproduce the hanging problem with the input PDF file you mentioned on Ubuntu Linux 18.0.4 with Python 3.7.3 and OpenJDK 11.0.4. I suspect some sort of platform-specific jpype weirdness, but I unfortunately don't have a MacOS box to debug this. I'll leave the issue open for the time being in case anyone who can investigate further has further input.

[adarsa]

I had this issue with all pdf's I tried.

[suiyuan2009]

+1

[sprakash93]

+1

[lebedov]

I finally obtained access to a MacOS box. I can't reproduce the problem with Python 3.8.5, OpenJDK 14.0.2, and python-pdfbox 0.1.8 on MacOS 10.15.6; processing the indicated file succeeds without any error.

[peterHeuz]

I had the same issue also on macOS Mojave and this Java JDK version:
java version "1.8.0_151"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_151-b12)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.151-b12, mixed mode)

I installed the openJDK 15 from here and that fixed the issue.

[lebedov]

@peterHeuz Given that more than person has encountered the issue on MacOS, I added a note to the package README.