Extracting a title from a pdf document

pdfutil.py

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
import subprocess
import sys
import tempfile

def extract_pdf_title(pdfdata):
  src_file = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(delete=True)
  src_file.write(pdfdata)
  src_file.flush()

  try:
    command = ' '.join(['pdftohtml', '-c -s -i', '-stdout', '-f 1', '-l 1',
                        '-xml', src_file.name, '/tmp/pdftoxml'])
    xmlout, xmlerr = subprocess.Popen(command, shell=True,
                                      stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                                      stderr=subprocess.STDOUT).communicate('')
    xml_data = open('/tmp/pdftoxml.xml').read()
  except:
    print 'Error in pdftohtml '
    return ''

  dom = BeautifulStoneSoup(xml_data)
  text = dom.findAll('text')

  # let the title be the first set of text elements until we see a change in font
  title_text = ''
  last_font = None
  for t in text:
    if last_font is not None and t.get('font') != last_font:
      if len(title_text) > 5: break
      else: title_text = ''

    title_text += t.getText().encode('utf-8') + ' '
    last_font = t.get('font')

  return title_text

if __name__ == '__main__':
  for f in sys.argv[1:]:
    print f, ' -- ', extract_pdf_title(open(f).read())