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Home » Newsletter » November 2011

By V. Subhash

In Version 4 of PDFOne, we introduced a new method getPageElements() in the PdfDocument class.

List 	getPageElements(int pageNum,
                     int elementTypes) 

List 	getPageElements(String pageRange,
                     int elementTypes) 

This method returns a list containing PdfPageElement instances. But, PdfPageElement is the parent class of individual element classes, namely PdfPageCompositeElement, PdfPageImageElement, PdfPagePathElement, and PdfPageTextElement. You can directly access items in the returned list as instances of these derived classes.

The derived classes provide a lot more information about the retrieved page element. For example, with the PdfPageTextElement instance, you can not only find the actual text represented by the text element but also the location, font rotation (if any), and other details. In the following code snippet, we will see how this is done.

import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.ArrayList;

import javax.imageio.ImageIO;

import com.gnostice.pdfone.PDFOne;
import com.gnostice.pdfone.PdfDocument;
import com.gnostice.pdfone.PdfException;
import com.gnostice.pdfone.PdfPageElement;
import com.gnostice.pdfone.PdfPageImageElement;
import com.gnostice.pdfone.PdfPageTextElement;


public class Page_Element_Parsing_Demo {

  public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, PdfException, Exception {
        
    int i, n;
    PdfPageTextElement PdfPageTextElement1;
    PdfPageImageElement PdfPageImageElement1;
    BufferedImage BufferedImage1;
    
    // Load a PDF document
    PdfDocument doc = new PdfDocument();
    doc.load("sample.pdf");
    
    // Retrieve image elements from page 1 of the document
    ArrayList lstImageElements = 
        (ArrayList) doc.getPageElements(1, PdfPageElement.ELEMENT_TYPE_IMAGE);
    // Retrieve text elements from page 1 of the document
    ArrayList lstTextElements = 
        (ArrayList) doc.getPageElements(1, PdfPageElement.ELEMENT_TYPE_TEXT);
    
    // Iterate through retrieved image elements 
    n = lstImageElements.size();        
    for (i = 0; i < n; i++) {
      // Save image content of the current image element to file
      PdfPageImageElement1 = (PdfPageImageElement) lstImageElements.get(i);
      BufferedImage1 = PdfPageImageElement1.getImage();            
      File File1 = new File("page1_image" + (i+1) + ".png");
      try {
        ImageIO.write(BufferedImage1, "png", File1);
      } catch (Exception e) {
        System.out.println("Sorry, there was an error." + e.getMessage());
      }

      // Print details of the current image element
      System.out.println("Image Element #" + (i+1) + " saved to: " +
                         "page1_image" + (i+1) + ".bmp (" + 
                         PdfPageImageElement1.getImageHeight() +
                         " x " + 
                         PdfPageImageElement1.getImageWidth() + 
                         ")");
    }
    
    // Close the document - it needs to be loaded only when images  
    // need to be extracted - images are accessed only on-demand. 
    doc.close();           
    
    // Iterate through retrieved text elements
    n = lstTextElements.size();        
    for (i = 0; i < n; i++) {
      PdfPageTextElement1 = (PdfPageTextElement) lstTextElements.get(i);
      // Print details of the current text element
      System.out.println("Text Element #" + (i+1) + " \"" + 
                         PdfPageTextElement1.getText() + "\" uses font " + 
                         PdfPageTextElement1.getTextFontInfo().getFontName());
    }
  }    
}

This code snippet tries to parse text and image elements in page 1 of a document. The text elements are displayed in the console while image elements are saved to a file. Here is the document that was used to test this document.

Here is the output of the program when used with the above document. The output mentions the image and text elements that were found in page 1 of the document.

Here is the image element after it was saved to a file.