title: Extracting information from PDFs of research papers
body: <p>I need a mechanism for extracting bibliographic metadata from PDF documents, to save people entering it by hand or cut-and-pasting it.</p>
  
  <p>At the very least, the title and abstract. The list of authors and their affiliations would be good. Extracting out the references would be amazing.</p>
  
  <p>Ideally this would be an open source solution. </p>
  
  <p>The problem is that not all PDF's encode the text, and many which do fail to preserve the logical order of the text, so just doing pdf2text gives you line 1 of column 1, line 1 of column 2, line 2 of column 1 etc.</p>
  
  <p>I know there's a lot of libraries. It's identifying the abstract, title authors etc. on the document that I need to solve. This is never going to be possible every time, but 80% would save a lot of human effort.</p>