I don't know if it's possible, but I'm receiving forms in PDF format. I need to take the text from the PDF in the exact same position it is in the file and place it in a text document I can parse like:
Line 4 startCharacter 50 endcharacter 60
This would give me whatever text is in that position.
Is this possible?
At the moment, it is not possible to do this. I found a Feature Request made to Cloud Vision API to take a PDF file and export it as a searchable PDF which might resolve this issue. I recommend you to subscribe to the Feature Request (click on the star next to the title) so it can get more visibility.
In the meantime, you can check the documentation on PDFs recognition to try it out and see if you can get the desired behavior.
If the forms you are working with have a determined format, you might be able to solve the issue by going through the TextAnnotation response from the API. The response gives you the text, plus additional insights on it, like the pages, paragraphs, etc.