Mark Stephens

  https://www.idrsolutions.com Mark founded the company and has worked with Java and PDF since 1997. The original creator of the core code, he is also a NetBeans enthusiast who enjoys speaking at conferences and reading. He holds an Athletics Blue and an MA in Mediaeval History from St. Andrews University.

   



193 Stories by Mark Stephens

What are Form XObjects?

Form XObjects (not be confused with forms which are buttons, checkboxes, buttons, etc) are an advanced feature of the PDF file format. They can...
44 sec read

Is it possible to extract flattened form data from a PDF file?

Like many of my best articles this posting was inspired by a customer question. We try to answer all questions and often use a...
1 min read

What are Hyperlinks in PDF files?

Hyperlinks are external, cliackable links which appear on web pages and other documents and allow you to go web pages or download files. PDF...
1 min read

What is PDF form flattening?

PDF files can include interactive forms – radio buttons, checkboxes, text boxes, lists, etc. There are interactive widgets – the user can click on...
40 sec read

3 steps to finding a range of numeric values on a PDF page

Over the holiday I read an interesting question asking how to find numbers within a specific range on a PDF page. This set me...
54 sec read

Why is my PDF Producer showing up in Chinese (or all the adventure of the wrongly encoded textstream)

I was recently sent a PDF file where some of the metadata appeared to be wrong. In particular, the PRODUCER field was appearing in...
1 min read