Extracting coordinates from XML or idml

[kind123]

Hello,

I'm trying to extract the (x,y) coordinates and width and height of textboxes and images after exporting as XML or idml. When I export it as HTML I can see the style tag that contains the coordinates in pixels. Where can I find this information in the XML or extracted XML from idml?

Example from html:

style="position:absolute;top:28.8px;left:42.6px;"

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Have you added ".zip" to your IDML file to get to the contents? 

And I don't think you'll get coordinates info from exported XML. 

[Joel Cherney]

You can't just open it up and find X,Y coordinates, no. But you (not me! looks like a massive slog to my eyes) can find the "ItemTransform" value. It's not trivial to turn that value into a pair of x,y coords, though. Kindl123, have you looked at the IDML specification? I only searched briefly, but in the 8.0 version published in 2012, I found a discussion of "Page Item Geometry" on page 104. I'd copy/paste it here, but for reasons I won't speculate about, the whole PDF is locked down with a password, and I can't copy/paste the relevant bit here. Suffiice it to say that it's Deeper Than It Looks.

[Joel Cherney · Accepted solution]

Egads. Lots deeper! Marc Autret wrote a whole book about it.

Happy reading, Kindl123!