Question

I am trying to use the AbcPdf .net component (version 7) to process some PDFs and generate metadata. I was wondering if there is anyway to list all the tags in a pdf document? As an example of a tagged pdf, I am using this file here

Are there any other components or tools available for listing or extracting pdf tags?

Thanks in advance for you help

Answer 1

Use iTextSharp. It’s free and you only need the “itextsharp.dll”.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp/

Here is a simple function for reading the text out of a PDF.

Public Shared Function GetTextFromPDF(PdfFileName As String) As String
    Dim oReader As New iTextSharp.text.pdf.PdfReader(PdfFileName)

    Dim sOut = ""

    For i = 1 To oReader.NumberOfPages
        Dim its As New iTextSharp.text.pdf.parser.SimpleTextExtractionStrategy

        sOut &= iTextSharp.text.pdf.parser.PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(oReader, i, its)
    Next

    Return sOut
End Function

ITextSharp also has methods for dealing with tags.