Question

All the documentation I can find seems to suggest I can only extract the entire file’s content. But I need to extract pages individually. Do I need to write my own parser for that? Is there some obvious method that I am missing?

Answer 1

Actually Tika does handle pages (at least in pdf) by sending elements <div><p> before page starts and </p></div> after page ends. You can easily setup page count in your handler using this (just counting pages using only <p>):

public abstract class MyContentHandler implements ContentHandler {
    private String pageTag = "p";
    protected int pageNumber = 0;
    ...
    @Override
    public void startElement (String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes atts) throws SAXException  {  

        if (pageTag.equals(qName)) {
            startPage();
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void endElement (String uri, String localName, String qName) throws SAXException {  

        if (pageTag.equals(qName)) {
            endPage();
        }
    }

    protected void startPage() throws SAXException {
    pageNumber++;
    }

    protected void endPage() throws SAXException {
    return;
    }
    ...
}

When doing this with pdf you may run into the problem when parser doesn’t send text lines in proper order – see Extracting text from PDF files with Apache Tika 0.9 (and PDFBox under the hood) on how to handle this.