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A
Anonymous
May 17, 2016
Answered

Overlay PDF pages

  • May 17, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 6269 views

Hello, I have 200+ pages PDF file and i want to overlay all pages on a single page. Is this possible through Acrobat JavaScript? I have tried overlaying pages by converting it to images using VBA on Microsoft PPT but for some reason its getting stuck. I am not a JavaScript programmer, so, Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am currently using Adobe Acrobat Professional 9 pro. Thanks in Advance.

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Correct answer Karl Heinz Kremer

This seems a very convoluted path. Why not get the location of each word in the PDF and see if any words sit outside the box?


TSN's approach can actually be done in JavaScript - as long as you know the location and size of the green box. The trick is to figure out of any part of a word is outside of that green box.

Take a look at the "word finder": Acrobat DC SDK Documentation  - Doc.getPageNthWordQuads() The documentation for Doc.getPageNthWord() has a reference to an example ("Example 2") that demonstrates how to iterate over all words.

What you want to do with overlaying page content is not easily possible in Acrobat. Two potential solutions were already mentioned (layers, which would require you to split the document into individual pages and then import them as payers), and watermarks (which would require you to apply every page in your document as a watermark). This approach does have limitations however: When a page has a white background, it will obscure everything else that was placed on the "page layer stack" so far, and you will not be able to see what was put on that stack before.

If you really want to use this overlay approach. I actually have a tool that I wrote for myself while analyzing customer files a while ago that takes every page of a document and creates such a composite page. It's a Java program that would require you to have Java installed (this is different from JavaScript). You can download it from here: MergePages.jar​

There is no warranty associated with that download, it works well for the kind of file it was designed for, but it may not work for you. If you choose to download the file, you are doing this at your own risk.

If you do download it, you would run it from the command line as follows:

java -jar MergePages.jar input.pdf output.pdf

1 reply

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maxwyss
Brainiac
May 17, 2016

It depends on what exactly you want to accomplish, but there are various approaches.

Probably the most common one would be using OCGs (Optional Content Groups, sometimes also called "layers"). You would import the document page by page, and turn them into a (named) OCG. Then you can show/hide them, either script-controlled or manually.

A similar approach would be creating button fields of the size of a page, import the page as the icon, and then show/hide those fields

Finally, you may also look at the Template functionality (which has some limitations with Reader).

In any case, don't fiddle around with pseudo-images, if you can use PDF (which you can do in the methods mentioned above).

Hope this can help.

A
Anonymous
May 18, 2016

Thank you so much Max,

I am actually trying to find out if there is any text outside the set margin in the PDF. This PDF was generated using some third party tool. Dose OCGs or template functionality helps me find out text outside margin?

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maxwyss
Brainiac
May 18, 2016

You're welcome Bachu.

Acrobat JavaScript's capability is only very limited to find contents, and it would have to be within the cropbox anyway. So, if the page is cropped, contents outside of the cropbox is ignored. However, if you want to get rid of it before importing, you could set the mediabox of the page to the cropbox. That should get rid of such contents.

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