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Ryan27865724o79c
Participant
January 9, 2023
Question

Help extracting info from PDFs to create automatic file-naming script

  • January 9, 2023
  • 4 replies
  • 1346 views

Hi All - Very new to the community and trying to solve a problem for one of our employees.

We have hundreds of PDF documents that were given to us as print-out's. One of our employee's needs to open each file, determine some info from the data inside, such as the date, the customer, etc and then re-name the PDF using that data.

 

Is there a way to automate this using Java Script or something else? I'd like to provide the basic details to our Development team so they can quickly write us a script to batch these.


Thank you!

Ryan

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4 replies

JR Boulay
Community Expert
JR BoulayCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 19, 2023

You should try (30 days) the AutoSplit plugin: https://evermap.com/AutoSplit.asp

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe
    try67
    Community Expert
    try67Community Expert
    Community Expert
    January 9, 2023

    As mentioned, this can be done using a custom-made script, but it's not a trivial task. Also, a script can't actually rename a file, it can only save a copy of it under a new name, but the original file will not be removed.


    If you're interested in hiring a professional to create it for you, feel free to contact me privately by clicking my user-name and then on "Send a Message".

    Thom Parker
    Community Expert
    Thom ParkerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 9, 2023

    Yes it's possible!! Use the doc.getPageNthWord() function to extract page text. Of course the scanned pages will need to be high quality and OCR'd 

    Here's the refernce entry

     

    https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/library/jsapiref/doc.html#getpagenthword

     

     

    Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often
      R
      Ryan27865724o79cAuthor
      Participant
      January 9, 2023

      Thank you Thom! I was pretty certain this was possible.  Much appreciated 🙂

      Thom Parker
      Community Expert
      Thom ParkerCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      January 9, 2023

      Be aware the this function is particularly slow. It may take up to 10 seconds to walk through all the words on a page, depending on the number of words and speed of the computer. 

      I use the function a lot. If I need to find multi-word phrases or patterns, I'll collect all the words in to a single string before searching. 

       

      An alternate method that works for Actions (i.e. batch processing) is to use the redaction search and mark feature, as the first command in the batch sequence. The method is perhaps 100x to 1000x faster than the JavaScript doc.getPageNthWord() function. It marks the the found words with redaction annots. You can then use a script as the second command in the batch sequence to acquire the selected words from the Annot.contents property of the redactions. And then delete the redactions.  There is commenting preference that needs to be set so that the text is picked up by the redact annot. 

       

       

      Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often
      R
      Ryan27865724o79cAuthor
      Participant
      January 9, 2023

      I should add we are scanning these documents into PDFs...

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