Node.js XPDF Tutorial to Export PDF File to Text and Save it as Audio File Using Say.js Module

Welcome folks today in this blog post we will be using the xpdf library to extract the text from the pdf file and save it as audio file using the say.js module in node.js. All the full source code of the application is shown below.

Get Started

In order to get started you need to install the below libraries using the npm command

npm i say

`Installing XPDF in Windows`

First of all guys go to https://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html and download the xpdf binaries and after that you need to add the path inside the environment variables as shown below

And now we need to write the below code inside the index.js file of your node.js project as shown below

index.js

const fs = require('fs');
const { exec } = require('child_process');
const say = require('say');

// read the PDF file

// convert the PDF to text using pdf-to-text command-line tool
exec(`pdftotext sample.pdf output.txt`, (error, stdout, stderr) => {
  if (error) {
    console.error(`exec error: ${error}`);
    return;
  }
  // convert the extracted text to speech
  say.export(fs.readFileSync("output.txt"), 'Microsoft Zira Desktop', 1, 'output.wav', function(err) {
    if (err) throw err;

    console.log('Audio file saved!');
  });
});

const fs = require('fs');

const { exec } = require('child_process');

const say = require('say');

// read the PDF file

// convert the PDF to text using pdf-to-text command-line tool

exec(`pdftotext sample.pdf output.txt`, (error, stdout, stderr) => {

if (error) {

console.error(`exec error: ${error}`);

return;

}

// convert the extracted text to speech

say.export(fs.readFileSync("output.txt"), 'Microsoft Zira Desktop', 1, 'output.wav', function(err) {

if (err) throw err;

console.log('Audio file saved!');

});

As you can see we are importing the exec module and the say module and then we are exporting the pdf file to text file which is output.txt and then we are reading the content of the text file and then we are converting to the output.wav audio file as shown below