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Replace text

New Here ,
Mar 26, 2021 Mar 26, 2021

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Hi all,

 

I've been trying to find a tool which I can use to find and replace some text in pdf files. We have Adobe Pro and we can totally do it manually but it will be very tedious and time consuming since we have thousands of files.

 

Is there a way we can do it programmatically? As far as I've known there is Adobe DC that has API that we can use, but rather than that, is there any libraries (C#, Python, etc) we can download and use it directly without calling APIs?

 

Thank you in advance,

D

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Community Expert ,
Mar 26, 2021 Mar 26, 2021

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Our current set of Document Services APIs do not have the ability to search for and then replace text in a PDF. You'll need a PDF library tool to do that sort of operation.

 

That said, it is very, very, unlikely that you will be able to accomplish your goal using just a PDF library tool. Because of the way that the PDF format stores text strings, you would only be able to replace the text with text that fits precisely in the same space. Adobe Acrobat is able to coalesce chunks of text and allow minor edits but if you've ever used the tool, you know that when the replacement causes a word wrap, the results can cause text to overlap other blocks of text in the document. Most PDF library tools do not interpret text blocks and would not even rewrap the text, it would just overlap the words around the replacement.

 

My recommendation is to recreate the PDF from source with the text replaced. If you don't have the source, Document Services APIs can be used to export your documents to common Office formats.

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New Here ,
Mar 29, 2021 Mar 29, 2021

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Thank you Joel, I really appreciate your detailed answer.

 

D

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New Here ,
May 28, 2024 May 28, 2024

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How did you manage to do this ? i converted my pdf to docx but how can i replace the text in the docx?

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Community Expert ,
May 28, 2024 May 28, 2024

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You'd need to use the Word API to do that.

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New Here ,
May 28, 2024 May 28, 2024

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so it cant be done using adobe pdf services, im trying to remove dependencys from Microsoft office

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