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adrian5FDF
Participant
Jun 10, 2021 8:24 PM UTC
Question

Extract and replace test in PDF

Hi all, 

 

I have  a pdf generated in appl Pages. The pdf has several data tables / text boxes per page.

Wondering if the following is possible:

 

Detect all text content on page, whether in tables or text boxes, etc. 

Extract text and replace w/ other text, thus generating the same doc w/ entirely new text. 

 

I've looked at some of the OCR and text extraction samples/docs. Extracting the data seems pretty strait forwards. But can I replace it? The use case is translating the doc to another language.

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    6 replies

    Joel Geraci
    Community Expert
    Joel GeraciCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    Jun 10, 2021 8:35 PM UTC

    Adobe doesn't have a Document Services API to do this. That said, it's not really something you'll want to do. Text in a PDF is generally laid down with precise coordinates and isn't able to be replaced without causing overlaps.

    If you want to create new PDF files with different text, I suggest looking at the Document Generation API which will allow you to start with a Word template plus some JSON and output a PDF where the JSON is merged into tagged "fields" in the document.

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    adrian5FDFAuthor
    Participant
    Jun 15, 2021 9:27 PM UTC
    Hi Joel, thanks for the feedback.

    That makes sense. Looks like using a template is the way to go. We don't
    use Word though, and also manually tagging our complex documents would be
    really time consuming.

    I wonder if something like this would work:
    > extract text using the extract API, thus getting content and coordinates
    > populate a new blank PDF with the data, using the coordinate info to
    insert text in blank document
    ( I would use another PDF js library for this part, if needed)

    I downloaded the sample json output from the Extract API, and see a bunch
    of coordinate data.
    Could I use that to position text in a new document?
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    Joel Geraci
    Community Expert
    Joel GeraciCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    Jun 15, 2021 9:35 PM UTC

    Do you control the authoring process of these documents before they get converted to PDF or is this situation where you need to take what you are given?

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