IEEE-pdf-reader

What problem does it solve?

It helps when an IEEE research PDF cannot be opened by the built-in reader due to DRM/password protection errors, by extracting usable text from the downloaded PDF instead.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Multi-backend text extraction: Tries pypdf first, then pdfplumber, then pdfminer.six to maximize the chance of success on different IEEE PDF formats.
• Page-range targeting: Extracts specific pages (single page or ranges) so you can quickly retrieve the relevant parts without processing the entire document.
• Deterministic error handling and fallbacks: Produces clearer failure summaries for common deterministic issues (like empty-password decryption failures) and continues across backends rather than crashing immediately.

Use case: You have an IEEE paper you downloaded locally and the built-in PDF reader reports it as password-protected; you want the text from pages 7–10 (e.g., experiments/results) so you can read and cite the content.

Quick Start

Run scripts/read_ieee_pdf.py on your local IEEE PDF and request the pages you need using the --pages option.