How to analyse PDF documents with Amazon Textract in a Synchronous way?

Question

I want to extract tables from a bunch of PDFs I have. To do this I am using AWS Textract Python pipeline.

Please advise how can I do this without SNS and SQS? I want it to be synchronous: provide my pipeline a PDF file, call AWS Textract and get the results.

Here is what I use meanwhile, please advise what should I change:

import boto3
import time

def startJob(s3BucketName, objectName):
    response = None
    client = boto3.client('textract')
    response = client.start_document_text_detection(
    DocumentLocation={
        'S3Object': {
            'Bucket': s3BucketName,
            'Name': objectName
        }
    })

    return response["JobId"]

def isJobComplete(jobId):
    # For production use cases, use SNS based notification 
    # Details at: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/textract/latest/dg/api-async.html
    time.sleep(5)
    client = boto3.client('textract')
    response = client.get_document_text_detection(JobId=jobId)
    status = response["JobStatus"]
    print("Job status: {}".format(status))

    while(status == "IN_PROGRESS"):
        time.sleep(5)
        response = client.get_document_text_detection(JobId=jobId)
        status = response["JobStatus"]
        print("Job status: {}".format(status))

    return status

def getJobResults(jobId):

    pages = []

    client = boto3.client('textract')
    response = client.get_document_text_detection(JobId=jobId)

    pages.append(response)
    print("Resultset page recieved: {}".format(len(pages)))
    nextToken = None
    if('NextToken' in response):
        nextToken = response['NextToken']

    while(nextToken):

        response = client.get_document_text_detection(JobId=jobId, NextToken=nextToken)

        pages.append(response)
        print("Resultset page recieved: {}".format(len(pages)))
        nextToken = None
        if('NextToken' in response):
            nextToken = response['NextToken']

    return pages

# Document
s3BucketName = "ki-textract-demo-docs"
documentName = "Amazon-Textract-Pdf.pdf"

jobId = startJob(s3BucketName, documentName)
print("Started job with id: {}".format(jobId))
if(isJobComplete(jobId)):
    response = getJobResults(jobId)

#print(response)

# Print detected text
for resultPage in response:
    for item in resultPage["Blocks"]:
        if item["BlockType"] == "LINE":
            print ('\033[94m' +  item["Text"] + '\033[0m')

Answer 1

You cannot directly process PDF documents synchronously with Textract currently. From the Textract documentation:

Amazon Textract synchronous operations (DetectDocumentText and AnalyzeDocument) support the PNG and JPEG image formats. Asynchronous operations (StartDocumentTextDetection, StartDocumentAnalysis) also support the PDF file format.

A work-around would be to convert the PDF document into images in your code and then use the synchronous API operations with these images to process the documents.