Question

I’d like to know if there’s some PDF library in Microsoft .NET being able of extracting text by giving coordinates.

For example (in pseudo-code):

PdfReader reader = new PdfReader();
reader.Load("file.pdf");

// Top, bottom, left, right in pixels or any other unit
string wholeText = reader.GetText(100, 150, 20, 50);

I’ve tried to do so using PDFBox for .NET (that one working on top of IKVM) with no luck, and it seems to be very outdated and undocumented.

Perhaps anyone has a good sample of doing so with PDFBox, iTextSharp or any other open-sourced library, and he/she can give me a hint.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Well, thank you for your effort anyone.

I got it using Apache’s PDFBox on top of IKVM compilation, and this is the final code:

PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(@"c:\invoice.pdf");

PDFTextStripperByArea stripper = new PDFTextStripperByArea();
stripper.addRegion("testRegion", new java.awt.Rectangle(0, 10, 100, 100));
stripper.extractRegions((PDPage)doc.getDocumentCatalog().getAllPages().get(0));

string text = stripper.getTextForRegion("testRegion");

And it works like a charm.

Thank you anyway and I hope my own answer will help others. If you need further details, just comment out here and I’ll update this answer.