I have a PDF document I want to read fields of that document but PDAcroForm object is null from docCatalog.getAcroForm();. with PDFTextStripper I am able to get the complete pdf as text, but I want to read fields.
The document is here.
The PDF you shared does not contain any AcroForm form fields.
If you inspect the file using a PDF browser (like iText RUPS or PDFBox PDFDebugger), you'll see that the Catalog only contains a Pages and a Type entry:
In particular, there is no AcroForm entry which bundles the data of an AcroForm form. Thus, docCatalog.getAcroForm(); cannot return any existing field structure.
Looking at the last Contents stream of e.g. page 1, one sees
Q
q
Q
q
1 0 0 1 329.78 655.45 cm
/Xi5 Do
Q
q
Q
q
1 0 0 1 324.17 624.51 cm
/Xi8 Do
Q
q
Q
q
1 0 0 1 265.95 702.31 cm
/Xi10 Do
Q
q
Q
q
1 0 0 1 554.46 655.6 cm
/Xi17 Do
Q
...
This is typical for a PDF which used to contain an AcroForm form definition which then was flattened into the page contents, for each former form field an XObject (which before defined the appearance of the form field widget annotation) is now referenced directly from the page content stream.
Thus, the only way to extract contents is via text extraction.
The obvious problem with text extraction is that it may be difficult to differentiate between former field contents and static form text like labels. Depending on the number of PDFs you have to extract data from it might be worth extending the PDFTextStripper to add some marker for text extracted from some XObject contents (in contrast to immediate page contents). Such markers would allow you to differentiate quite well.
Related
I have a field from acroform and I see field.setValue() and field.setRichTextValue(...). The first one set the correct value, but second one seems not working, rich text value is not display.
Here is code im using :
PDDocument pdfDocument = PDDocument.load(new File(SRC));
pdfDocument.getDocument().setIsXRefStream(true);
PDAcroForm acroForm = pdfDocument.getDocumentCatalog().getAcroForm();
acroForm.setNeedAppearances(false);
acroForm.getField("tenantDataValue").setValue("Deuxième texte");
acroForm.getField("tradingAddressValue").setValue("Text replacé");
acroForm.getField("buildingDataValue").setValue("Deuxième texte");
acroForm.getField("oldRentValue").setValue("750");
acroForm.getField("oldChargesValue").setValue("655");
acroForm.getField("newRentValue").setValue("415");
acroForm.getField("newChargesValue").setValue("358");
acroForm.getField("increaseEffectiveDateValue").setValue("Texte 3eme contenu");
// THIS RICH TEXT NOT SHOW ANYTHING
PDTextField field = (PDTextField) acroForm.getField("tableData");
field.setRichText(true);
String val = "\\rtpara[size=12]{para1}{This is 12pt font, while \\span{size=8}{this is 8pt font.} OK?}";
field.setRichTextValue(val);
I expect field named "tableData" to be setted with rich text value!
You can download the PDF form I am using with this code : download pdf form
and you can download the output after runn this code and flatten form data download output here
To sum up what has been said in the comments to the question plus some studies of the working version...
Wrong rich text format
The OP in his original code used this as rich text
String val = "\\rtpara[size=12]{para1}{This is 12pt font, while \\span{size=8}{this is 8pt font.} OK?}";
which he took from this document. But that document is the manual for the LaTeX richtext package which provides commands and documentation needed to “easily” produce such rich strings. I.e. the \rtpara... above is not PDF rich text but instead a LaTeX command that produces PDF rich text (if executed in a LaTeX context).
The document actually even demonstrates this using the example
\rtpara[indent=first]{para1}{Now is the time for
\span{style={bold,italic,strikeit},color=ff0000}{J\374rgen}
and all good men to come to the aid of \it{their}
\bf{country}. Now is the time for \span{style=italic}
{all good} women to do the same.}
for which the instruction generates two values, a rich text value and a plain text value:
\useRV{para1}: <p dir="ltr" style="text-indent:12pt;
margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;">Now is the time
for <span style="text-decoration:line-through;
font-weight:bold;font-style:italic;color:#ff0000;
">J\374rgen</span> and all good men to come to the
aid of <i>their</i> <b>country</b>. Now is the
time for <span style="font-style:italic;">all
good</span> women to do the same.</p>
\useV{para1}: Now is the time for J\374rgen and all
good men to come to the aid of their country. Now
is the time for all good women to do the same.
As one can see in the \useRV{para1} result, PDF rich text uses (cut down) HTML markup for rich text.
For more details please lookup the PDF specification, e.g. section 12.7.3.4 "Rich Text Strings" in the copy of ISO 32000-1 published by Adobe here
PDFBox does not create rich text appearances
The OP in his original code uses
acroForm.setNeedAppearances(false);
This sets a flag that claims that all form fields have appearance streams (in which the visual appearance of the respective form field plus its content are elaborated) and that these streams represent the current value of the field, so it effectively tells the next processor of the PDF that it can use these appearance streams as-is and does not need to generate them itself.
As #Tilman quoted from the JavaDocs, though,
/**
* Set the fields rich text value.
*
* <p>
* Setting the rich text value will not generate the appearance
* for the field.
* <br>
* You can set {#link PDAcroForm#setNeedAppearances(Boolean)} to
* signal a conforming reader to generate the appearance stream.
* </p>
*
* Providing null as the value will remove the default style string.
*
* #param richTextValue a rich text string
*/
public void setRichTextValue(String richTextValue)
So setRichTextValue does not create an appropriate appearance stream for the field. To signal the next processor of the PDF (in particular a viewer or form flattener) that it has to generate appearances, therefore, one needs to use
acroForm.setNeedAppearances(true);
Making Adobe Acrobat (Reader) generate the appearance from rich text
When asked to generate field appearances for a rich text field, Adobe Acrobat has the choice to do so either based on the rich text value RV or the flat text value V. I did some quick checks and Adobe Acrobat appears to use these strategies:
If RV is set and the value of V equals the value of RV without the rich text markup, Adobe Acrobat assumes the value of RV to be up-to-date and generates an appearance from this rich text string according to the PDF specification. Else the value of RV (if present at all) is assumed to be outdated and ignored!
Otherwise, if the V value contains rich text markup, Adobe Acrobat assumes this value to be rich text and creates the appearance according to this styling.
This is not according to the PDF specification.
Probably some software products used to falsely put the rich text into the V value and Adobe Acrobat started to support this misuse for larger compatibility.
Otherwise the V value is used as a plain string and an appearance is generated accordingly.
This explains why the OP's original approach using only
field.setRichTextValue(val);
showed no change - the rich text value was ignored by Adobe Acrobat.
And it also explains his observation
then instead of setRichTextValue simply using field.setValue("<body xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml\"><p style=\"color:#FF0000;\">Red
</p><p style=\"color:#1E487C;\">Blue
</p></body>") works ! in acrobat reader (without flatten) the field is correctly formatted
Be aware, though, that this is beyond the PDF specification. If you want to generate valid PDF, you have to set both RV and V and have the latter contain the plain version of the rich text of the former.
For example use
String val = "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>"
+ "<body xfa:APIVersion=\"Acroform:2.7.0.0\" xfa:spec=\"2.1\" xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml\" xmlns:xfa=\"http://www.xfa.org/schema/xfa-data/1.0/\">"
+ "<p dir=\"ltr\" style=\"margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12pt\">"
+ "This is 12pt font, while "
+ "<span style=\"font-size:8pt\">this is 8pt font.</span>"
+ " OK?"
+ "</p>"
+ "</body>";
String valClean = "This is 12pt font, while this is 8pt font. OK?";
field.setValue(valClean);
field.setRichTextValue(val);
or
String val = "<body xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml\"><p style=\"color:#FF0000;\">Red
</p><p style=\"color:#1E487C;\">Blue
</p></body>";
String valClean = "Red\rBlue\r";
field.setValue(valClean);
field.setRichTextValue(val);
I am generating a PDF document using jsPDF. Is there a way to store metadata in the PDF document that will force Acrobat to open it in 100% view mode (Actual Size) vs sized to fit?
In other words does PDF document specification allow that to specify it in the document itself?
This is definitely possible, because a PDF document can contain information on how it should open.
You might create such a document in Acrobat and then find the opening information, and/or you might have a look at the Portable Document Format Reference, which is part of the Acrobat SDK, downloadable from the Adobe website.
However, I don't know whether you can insert that structure into the PDF with your tool.
I figured it out; in the Catalog section of the PDF document, there is a OpenAction section where we can specify how the view can show the file, among other things.
I changed this
putCatalog = function () {
out('/Type /Catalog');
out('/Pages 1 0 R');
// #TODO: Add zoom and layout modes
out('/OpenAction [3 0 R /FitH null]');
out('/PageLayout /OneColumn');
events.publish('putCatalog');
},
to this
putCatalog = function () {
out('/Type /Catalog');
out('/Pages 1 0 R');
// #TODO: Add zoom and layout modes
out('/OpenAction [3 0 R 1 100]'); //change from standard code to use zoom to 100 % instead of fit to width
out('/PageLayout /OneColumn');
events.publish('putCatalog');
},
The last tag in an XFDF file looks something like this:
<ids original="20639838865717E80D2556CB7B2AEC2D"
modified="754C78B10C9159419708446C3395CDBE"/>
I can get these values by exporting PDF form data from Acrobat using this method: http://wiki.developerforce.com/page/Adobe_XFDF_Ids_Determination.
However I want to get the IDs programmatically in order to build correct xfdf documents for arbitrary PDF forms.
How do I get these values using iText?
As explained in this post (removing PDFID in PDF) /ID is a recommended entry in the "trailer dictionary" (and required if an AcroForm is encrypted).
Using iText, IDs are accessed as a PdfArray of two PdfString objects in the trailer PdfDictionary. The String values will look like garbage because each is a representation of a byte array. These are the hex values you need for "original" and "modified".
The following code will print out the two IDs, which can be verified against e.g. an export from Acrobat Pro (NB Hex.encodeHexString is Apache commons-codec):
public void printIds(PdfReader reader) {
PdfDictionary trailer = reader.getTrailer();
if (trailer.contains(PdfName.ID)) {
PdfArray ids = (PdfArray) trailer.get(PdfName.ID);
PdfString original = ids.getAsString(0);
PdfString modified = ids.getAsString(1);
System.out.println(Hex.encodeHexString(original.getBytes()));
System.out.println(Hex.encodeHexString(modified.getBytes()));
}
}
Is there any tool to find the X-Y location on a text content in a pdf file ?
Docotic.Pdf Library can do it. See C# sample below:
using (PdfDocument doc = new PdfDocument("your_pdf.pdf"))
{
foreach (PdfTextData textData in doc.Pages[0].Canvas.GetTextData())
Console.WriteLine(textData.Position + " " + textData.Text);
}
Try running "Preflight..." in Acrobat and choosing PDF Analysis -> List page objects, grouped by type of object.
If you locate the text objects within the results list, you will notice there is a position value (in points) within the Text Properties -> * Font section.
TET, the Text Extraction Toolkit from the pdflib family of products can do that. TET has a commandline interface, and it's the most powerful of all text extraction tools I'm aware of. (It can even handle ligatures...)
Geometry
TET provides precise metrics for the text, such as the position on the page, glyph widths, and text direction. Specific areas on the page can be excluded or included in the text extraction, e.g. to ignore headers and footers or margins.
In Adobe Acrobat Pro, it's not that difficult to add links to a page, but I'm wondering if there's also a way to add "alt text" (sometimes called "title text") to links as well. In HTML, this would be done as such:
link
Then when the mouse is hovering over the link, the text appears as a little tooltip. Is there an equivalent for PDFs? And if so, how do you add it?
Actually PDF does support alternate text. It's part of Logical Structure documented PDF Reference 1.7 section 10.8.2 "Alternate Descriptions"
/Span << /Lang (en-us) /Alt (six-point star) >> BDC (✡) Tj EMC
In PDF syntax, Link annotations support a Contents entry to serve as an alternate description:
/Annots [
<<
/Type /Annot
/Subtype /Link
/Border [1 1 1]
/Dest [4 0 R /XYZ 0 0 null]
/Rect [ 50 50 80 60 ]
/Contents (Link)
>>
]
Quoting "PDF Reference - 6th edition - Adobe® Portable Document Format - Version 1.7 - November 2006" :
Contents text string (Optional) Text to be displayed for the annotation or, if this type of annotation does not display text, an alternate description of the annotation’s contents in human-readable form. In either case, this text is useful when extracting the document’s contents in support of accessibility to users with disabilities or for other purposes
And later on:
For all other annotation types (Link , Movie , Widget , PrinterMark , and TrapNet), the Contents entry provides an alternate representation of the annotation’s contents in human-readable form
This is displayed well with Sumatra PDF v3.1.2, when a border is present:
However this is not widely supported by other PDF readers.
The W3C, in its PDF Techniques for WCAG 2.0 recommend another ways to display alternative texts on links for accessibility purposes:
PDF11: Providing links and link text using the Link annotation and the /Link structure element in PDF documents
PDF13: Providing replacement text using the /Alt entry for links in PDF documents
No, it's not possible to add alt text to a link in a PDF. There's no provision for this in the PDF reference.
On a related note, links in PDFs and links in HTML documents are handled quite differently. A link in a PDF is actually a type of annotation, which sits on top of the page at specified co-ordinates, and has no technical relationship to the text or image in the document. Where as links in HTML documents bare a direct relationpship to the elements which they hyperlink.
Alt text, or alternate text, is not the same as title text. Title text is meta data intended for human consumption. Alt text is alternate text content upon media in case the media fails to load.
There is also a trick using an invisible form button that doesn't do anything but allows a small popup tooltip text to be added when the mouse hovers over it.
Officially, per PDF 1.7 as defined in ISO 32000-1 14.9.3 (see Adobe website for a free download of a document that is equivaent to the ISO standard for PDF 1.7), one would provide alternate text for an annotation - like for example a Link annotation - by adding a key "Contents" to its data structure and provide the alt text as a text string value for that key.
Unfortunately Acrobat does not seem to provide a user interface to add or edit this "Contents" text string for Link annotations, and even if it is present it will not be used for the tool tip. Instead the tool tip always seems to be the target of the Link annotation, at least if it points to a URL.
So on a visual level one could hack around this by adding some other invisible elements on top of the area of the Link annotation that have the desired behavior. Not a very nice hack, at least for my taste. In addition it does not help with accessibility of the PDF, as it introduces yet another stray object...
Facing the same problem I used the JS lib "pdf-lib" (https://pdf-lib.js.org/docs/api/classes/pdfdocument) to edit the content of the pdf file and add the missing attributes on annotations.
const pdfLib = require('pdf-lib');
const fs = require('fs');
function getNewMap(pdfDoc, str){
return pdfDoc.context.obj(
{
Alt: new pdfLib.PDFString(str),
Contents: new pdfLib.PDFString(str)
}).dict;
}
const pdfData = await fs.readFile('your-pdf-document.pdf');
const pdfDoc = await pdfLib.PDFDocument.load(pdfData);
pdfDoc.context.enumerateIndirectObjects().forEach(_o => {
const pdfRef = _o[0];
const pdfObject = _o[1];
if (typeof pdfObject?.lookup === "function"){
if (pdfObject.lookup(pdfLib.PDFName.of('Type'))?.encodedName === "/Annot"){
// We use the link URI to implement annotation "Alt" & "Contents" attributes
const annotLinkUri = pdfObject.lookup(pdfLib.PDFName.of('A')).get(pdfLib.PDFName.of('URI')).value;
const titleFromUri = annotLinkUri.replace(/(http:|)(^|\/\/)(.*?\/)/g, "").replace(/\//g, "").trim();
// We build the new map with "Alt" and "Contents" attributes and assign it to the "Annot" object dictionnary
const newMap = getNewMap(pdfDoc, titleFromUri);
const newdict = new Map([...pdfObject.dict, ...newMap]);
pdfObject.dict = newdict;
}
}
})
// We save the file
const pdfBytes = await pdfDoc.save();
await fs.promises.writeFile("your-pdf-document-accessible.pdf", pdfBytes);