Enumerating text objects

Does the QuickPDF library has a way to enumerate all text objects on a page and modify them?

Tomislav

There is, but it's not easy. PDF really isn't meant to be edited this way. There can be all sorts of markup within a word or phrase, making it very difficult to pick out.

Here's a simple example (vbscript) that will change the word "spouse" to "mate" in the IRS' f1040ez.pdf document. Note that some gaps are left in a couple of places, because each chunk of text has its own positioning information - it would be nearly impossible to close the gaps without a huge amount of effort.

Try to change "Spouse" to "Mate", and you'll begin to see the difficulties.

Dim QP, i, p, content
Dim inFileName, outFileName, QuickPDFKey


'-- Init iSedQuickPDF
Set QP = CreateObject("iSED.QuickPDF")

'-- Get QuickPDF Key
QuickPDFKey = WScript.Arguments(0)

'-- Set file names
inFileName = "f1040ez.pdf"
outFileName = "out.pdf"

'-- Unlock the PDF library
Call QP.UnlockKey(QuickPDFKey)

'-- Load the input PDF
Call QP.LoadFromFile(inFileName)

For p = 1 to QP.PageCount()
    Call QP.SelectPage(p)
    WScript.Echo "Page: " & p
    For i = 0 to QP.LayerCount()-1
        Call QP.SelectLayer(i)
        WScript.Echo "Layer: " & i
        content = QP.GetPageContent()
        If InStr(content, "spouse") Then
            WScript.Echo "Found"
            content = Replace(content, "spouse", "mate")
            Call QP.SetPageContent(content)
        End If
    Next
Next

Call QP.SaveToFile(outFileName)

'-- Clean up
Set QP = Nothing

Hi Chicks!

Your sample shows how to go through each layer ...
I've thought with CombineLayers i've the content of all layers together immediately without calling each layer...?

Best regards,
Ingo

Hi Tomislav!

Here's a code snippet that should help:

QP.SetMeasurementUnits(0);
QP.SetFillColor(1,1,1);
for i := 1 to QP.PageCount do
    begin
       QP.SelectPage(i);
       QP.CombineLayers;
       QP.DrawBox(1, QP.PageHeight - pixels, QP.PageWidth, pixels, 1);
//     . . .
    end;

Best regards,
Ingo