How can I adjust the 'word_margin' for reading PDFs with pdfminer in python?

Question

I've tried to manipulate the 'word_margin' with python using the following code but it throws me an error TypeError: get_pages() got an unexpected keyword argument 'word_margin'. PDFminer reads the document fine if I remove the word_margin=word_marginfrom the arguments.

Code:

def convert_pdf_to_txt(path):
    rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
    retstr = StringIO()
    codec = 'utf-8'
    laparams = LAParams()
    device = TextConverter(rsrcmgr, retstr, codec=codec, laparams=laparams)
    fp = open(path, 'rb')
    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
    password = ""
    maxpages = 0
    caching = True
    pagenos=set()
    word_margin = 1

    for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp, pagenos, word_margin=word_margin,maxpages=maxpages,password=password,caching=caching, check_extractable=True):

        interpreter.process_page(page)

    text = retstr.getvalue()

    fp.close()
    device.close()
    retstr.close()
    return text

Answer 1

word_margin is a parameter of LAParams class. If I understand correctly, the code should look like this:

from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from pdfminer.converter import TextConverter

from StringIO import StringIO

def convert_pdf_to_txt(path):
    rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
    retstr = StringIO()
    codec = 'utf-8'

    word_margin = 1
    laparams = LAParams(word_margin=word_margin)

    device = TextConverter(rsrcmgr, retstr, codec=codec, laparams=laparams)
    fp = open(path, 'rb')


    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
    password = ""
    maxpages = 0
    caching = True
    pagenos=set()

    for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp, pagenos, maxpages=maxpages,password=password,caching=caching, check_extractable=True):

        interpreter.process_page(page)

    text = retstr.getvalue()

    fp.close()
    device.close()
    retstr.close()
    return text