Convert odt, doc, docx, pdf to text with python and some linux programs. Doesn't require Libreoffice.

document_to_text.py

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
from docx import opendocx, getdocumenttext

#http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5725278/python-help-using-pdfminer-as-a-library
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.converter import TextConverter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from cStringIO import StringIO

def convert_pdf_to_txt(path):
    rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
    retstr = StringIO()
    codec = 'utf-8'
    laparams = LAParams()
    device = TextConverter(rsrcmgr, retstr, codec=codec, laparams=laparams)
    fp = file(path, 'rb')
    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
    password = ""
    maxpages = 0
    caching = True
    pagenos=set()
    for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp, pagenos, maxpages=maxpages, password=password,caching=caching, check_extractable=True):
        interpreter.process_page(page)
    fp.close()
    device.close()
    str = retstr.getvalue()
    retstr.close()
    return str

def document_to_text(filename, file_path):
    if filename[-4:] == ".doc":
        cmd = ['antiword', file_path]
        p = Popen(cmd, stdout=PIPE)
        stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
        return stdout.decode('ascii', 'ignore')
    elif filename[-5:] == ".docx":
        document = opendocx(file_path)
        paratextlist = getdocumenttext(document)
        newparatextlist = []
        for paratext in paratextlist:
            newparatextlist.append(paratext.encode("utf-8"))
        return '\n\n'.join(newparatextlist)
    elif filename[-4:] == ".odt":
        cmd = ['odt2txt', file_path]
        p = Popen(cmd, stdout=PIPE)
        stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
        return stdout.decode('ascii', 'ignore')
    elif filename[-4:] == ".pdf":
        return convert_pdf_to_txt(file_path)

Hi. I'm trying to build a module where i can convert PDF to .docx. The PDFs contain images and formatted text. can you suggest changes in your script which will help me achieve this output.

.doc conversion not working
returns empty string only