We're trying to take a PDF file created in a web application and dynamically insert it into an AFP datastream on an IBM iSeries. Does anyone know if this is possible?
The short answer is not easily.
There would be two ways to do that. The easiest way would be to convert the pdf to a series of tiff images and rewrite the afp stream to include them as IOCA images. If they are two-color fax G4 compressed, they can be converted to IOCA group 10 without too much trouble.
The second way would be to convert the pdf to AFP (the two formats have a lot of similarities) and rewrite the AFP stream to include it. If the PDF doesn't have embedded fonts then you shouldn't have too much trouble mapping the fonts to the AFP ones.
It may not look quite right at first. AFP allows you to position elements much more accurately than PDF does.
I agree with the previous answer that it's not an "easy" task...
But if you are familiar with AFP structure (or at least willing to learn the spec) you can technically add single page PDF objects into AFP using AFP's Object Containers.
But the downside is that you'll need a pretty modern AFP print environment to actually handle AFP that contains PDF object containers. Most printers I've dealt with won't handle it.
So converting the PDF to AFP and merging it into the parent document would be best. Applications like Xenos.com's d2e Vision will do a nice job of this.
You could try COMPART CPMILL, where you can convert your PDF to AFP and then you can insert easily it to your AFP.
We use this tool to insert PNG images in AFP.
Related
I wasn't able to find anything on the internet and I get the feeling that what I want is not such a trivial thing. To make a long story short: I'd like to get my hands on the underlying code that describes the PDF document of a selected area from a .pdf file. I've been looking for libraries or open source readers but couldn't find anything useful yet.
Does there exist something that might be able to accomplish my needs here or anything that might be reused (like an open source reader) to get there a little faster and not having to write everything from scratch?
You can convert a whole PDF document to PostScript using pdftops, one of the utilities from the poppler PDF rendering library.
This utility enables you to convert individual pages, which is at least a start.
If you just want to extract bitmapped images, try pdfimages from the same package. This extraction can also be restricted to individual pages.
The poppler library was originally written for UNIX-like systems, but there are a couple of windows builds available.
The open source tool from iText called iText RUPS does what you want, showing you all the PDF commands for a particular PDF and allow you to visualize the structure and relationships.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextrups/
We are developing a printing server that allows user to upload a DOC and print it out via HP ePrint. It needs to support page extraction.
I tried to use macro (with the help of Adobe Acrobat Reader Pro and MS Word) to extract pages into PDF. But it turns out that the size of PDF may be larger in size than expected.
Is there any way to extract pages (without lossing format - E.g. Table in DOC) from DOC to DOC, so that the size can be approximately the size?
This is a difficult requirement. It sounds like you have run into 2 problems (large PDFs and format loss) at the outset. You should probably say more about what you mean by "extraction" and why PDF is part of your solution because that's quite different from "upload and print" and "doc to doc". That way readers will have more suggestions for you.
I would suggest you try to approach the problem from a different angle if possible, because I suspect that you are unlikely to achive a good, efficent, stable result. One possible approach is to turn the DOC into PDF and then use iText or some other PDF library to manipulate the PDF before printing. It really depends on what you are trying to achieve - the specifics of your extract/merge/convert.
Like the title says. Reason I ask is that we're converting PDFs to formatted ASCII text (using pdftotext) and only want to display the ones that look reasonably sane.
PPT files tend to have text over images, diagonal text and others things that don't translate to ASCII very well, so we'd like to filter them out if we can.
The creating application of a PDF is listed in its XMP metadata. You can see this quite easily in Acrobat 9 (and I believe earlier): go to File > Properties, click Additional Metadata..., then go to Advanced and it's listed under both XMP Core Properties and PDF Properties:
xmp:CreatorTool: Microsoft PowerPoint
pdf:Creator: Microsoft PowerPoint
I'm guessing you want to find this programatically, so you'll need to find a library to read this metadata that works with your language. Here is a list of some XMP tools.
Short answer:
No, I don't think so.
Long answer:
No, I don't think so, because there are may ways to convert a PowerPoint file to pdf, for example Adobe Acrobat and PDFCreator and many many others. It's up to the converters to embed specific information in the PDF file, even if you find a way to detect PowerPoint-source pdf from one convert, the same method may not work for another.
Even longer answer:
No, I don't think so, because of the reasons described in the "long answer". And I don't think detecting the source of the PDF is the best approach to the problem you are trying to solve. Not just PowerPoint produces overlapped text and images. I think it's much better to detect the actual layout of the PDF file. If there are overlay of image and text, then you do some filtering or pre-processing to cater for that.
Your reasoning is very arbitrary - there are surely plenty of PPT files without the features you describe, and plenty of PDF files with them, that were generated from another source.
In theory a better method would just be to detect when these "unwanted" situations occur. However, even though the PDF format is partly open (only for reading, apparently, so it's not truly an open format), extracting complex data like that would be incredibly difficult.
All PDFs can have this problem regardless of their source. Most desktop publishing suites are capable of outputting PDF and are often sold boasting their high quality and flashier PDF presentations ...
A "saner" method would be to use a PDF parser, ITextSharp, or pdfNet...etc, Using the library of your choice, find all image rectangles, and all text rectangles, SORT THE RECTANGLES, and then see if there is substantial overlap of text and image rects -- ignoring image to image overlaps. If so, reject the page and/or document.
That won't be perfect, but at least it's going to catch many PDFs that aren't sane, regardless of source. Other heuristics to add would include color analysis. (i.e. are the colors in the overlapping region sufficiently different to allow "sane" results?)
Best of luck to you
It might put its name in the creator or producer info, but I don't have a copy to check this theory with.
In general, it is not an easy task to programmatically determine (reliably) where a file came from or how it was generated based on its contents. After all, a file is just a collection of bits.
Unless you have a lot of resources to expend building the heuristics to determine whether a file looks "reasonably sane" according to your needs, I would consider this a task for human beings.
some converter from ppt to pdf preserve creator in comments at begin of pdf.
I think that PDF's generated from most applications seem to be the same. It may have some meta-data that you can read from the file...
Does PDF and/or Adobe Reader support including an image by URL so that you can insert a dynamic images from a web server into a document?
The answer to your question is both yes and no. If you look in the PDF spec (I'm going by version 1.7) in section 7.11.5, you'll see that a stream within a PDF document can be represented by an URL. So yes, you can go ahead and specify that a PDF has, say, its image content in the specified URL.
The problem will be that when you specify an image within PDF, you are specifying a PARTICULAR image that must have a particular data length and encoding. Simply specifying dimensions, dct compression (aka jpg), and URL is not enough. Images are contained in streams of a particular length. If the stream is too long or too short, it is considered an error.
So you can have images dynamically served up, provided that they are always exactly the same byte length. I think. And I say this because the specification is somewhat ambiguous as to what happens when you set the length to 0 in the stream dictionary.
Now, is doing this practical? Maybe - you'll need a fairly strong PDF toolkit in order to be able to author these documents. And if you have that, I think you'd be better off authoring the entire PDF document that your clients want on the fly rather than trying to substitute an image at read time.
I don't believe you can place a dynamic image in a PDF document in this manner. It's possible to dynamically create an entire PDF document using web-hosted content (using PHP, Coldfusion, etc.) but changing that content later on the web server will not dynamically update previously generated PDF documents, which is what it sounds like you want to do.
As PDFs are meant to be portable by nature (PORTABLE Document Format) and thus, not always viewed online, this goes against the very principle of the document format, and is not supported as far as I know.
You could include a reference to an image at the time of generation of the PDF, but said image will embedded into the PDF, not linked.
You could use pdf.js and modify the rendering methods slightly so that you inject your image. You can find pdf.js here: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js
You can also use FlexPaper which has an API that allows you to overlay your document with images
http://flexpaper.devaldi.com/
My objective is to extract the text and images from a PDF file while parsing its structure. The scope for parsing the structure is not exhaustive; I only need to be able to identify headings and paragraphs.
I have tried a few of different things, but I did not get very far in any of them:
Convert PDF to text. It does not work for me as I lose images and the structure of the document.
Convert PDF to HTML. I found a few tools that helped me with this, and the best one so far is pdftohtml. The tool is really good presentation wise, but I haven't been able to successfully parse the HTML.
Convert PDF to XML. Same as above.
Anyone has any suggestions on how to tackle this problem?
There is essentially not an easy cut-and-paste solution because PDF isn't really very interested in structure. There are many other answers on this site that will tell you things in much more detail, but this one should give you the main points:
If identifying text structure in PDF documents is so difficult, how do PDF readers do it so well?
If you want to do this in PDF itself (where you would have the majority of control over the process), you'll have to loop over all text on pages and identify headers by looking at their text properties (fonts used, size relative to the other text on the page, etc...).
On top of that you'll also have to identify paragraphs by looking at the positioning of text fragments, white space on the page, closeness of certain letters, words and lines... PDF by itself doesn't even have a concept for a "word", let alone "lines" or "paragraphs".
To complicate things even more, the way text is drawn on the page (and thus the order in which it appears in the PDF file itself) doesn't even have to be the proper reading order (or what us humans would consider to be proper reading order).
PDF parsing for headers and its sub contents are really very difficult (It doesn't mean its impossible ) as PDF comes in various formats. But I recently encountered with tool named GROBID which can helps in this scenario. I know it's not perfect but if we provide proper training it can accomplish our goals.
Grobid available as a opensource on github.
https://github.com/kermitt2/grobid
You may do use the following approach like this with iTextSharp or other open source libraries:
Read PDF file with with iTextSharp or similar open source tools and collect all text objects into an array (or convert PDF to HTML using the tool like pdftohtml and then parse HTML)
Sort all text objects by coordinates so you will have them all together
Then iterate through objects and check the distance between them to see if 2 or more objects can be merged into one paragraph or not
Or you may use the commercial tool like ByteScout PDF Extractor SDK that is capable of doing exactly this:
extract text and images along with analyzing the layout of the text
XML or CSV where text objects are merged or splitted into paragraphs inside a virtual layout grid
access objects via special API that makes it possible to address each object via its "virtual" row and column index disregarding how it is stored inside the original PDF.
Disclaimer: I am affiliated with ByteScout
PDF files can be parsed with tabula-py, or tabula-java.
I made a full tutorial on how to use tabula-py on this article. You can tabula in a web-browser too as long as you have installed Java.
Unless its is Marked Content, PDF does not have a structure.... You have to 'guess' it which is what the various tools are doing. There is a good blog post explaining the issues at http://blog.idrsolutions.com/2010/09/the-easy-way-to-discover-if-a-pdf-file-contains-structured-content/
As mentioned in the answers above, PDF's aren't very easy to parse. However, if you have certain additional information regarding the text that you want to parse, you can pull it off.
If your headings are positioned at specific parts of the page, you can parse the PDF file and sort the parsed output by coordinates.
If you have prior knowledge of the spacing between headings and paragraphs, you could also leverage this information to parse the file.
PDFBox is a PDF parsing tool that you can use for extracting text and images on top of which you can define your custom rules for parsing.
However, for parsing PDFs you need to have some prior knowledge of the general format of the PDF file. You can check out the following blogpost Document parsing for more information regarding document parsing.
Disclaimer:I was involved in writing the blogpost.
iText api:
PdfReader pr=new PdfReader("C:\test.pdf");
References:
PDFReader