I see a lot of complaints about the PDF file format on various forums, moaning about it. They tend to focus mainly on 2 issues:- 1. The PDF file format is complicated. 2. Extraction, especially of text, is not always straight-forward. Both of these, I think, are essentially unfair. PDF arose out of Postscript and…
I have been looking at an issue for a potential client recently which required the generation of different views of the page. This is interesting because it allows me to show you the internal workings of the PDF file format rather elegantly. It seems to be an increasingly common activity from our clients these days…
I came across an interesting issue with PDF Text fields while debugging a file this week. We were sent a 2 page document created with IText, containing some text fields and we were displaying both pages with text fields containing identical values – they appear different in Acrobat. Obviously Acrobat is always right (even when it…
Because PDF is very much an output and display format it does not contain much format information such as paragraph breaks and spaces unless these tags are explicity added (Adobe calls it MarkedContent). In this case, it is possible to extract an almost perfect copy of the text data in a PDF. Otherwise, the software…
