Question

I’m having some problems with iText. (Specifically, iTextSharp.) I’m trying to split a single large PDF file into a bunch of smaller ones. That’s not the issue; that works.

What I’m finding is that some(Just one; the rest remain embedded just fine.) of the fonts in the input PDF file, while they’re embedded in the input PDF file, are no longer embedded in the output PDF file, despite being copied with iText.

What this results in, in the end, is a readable output PDF file, that when opened in Adobe Reader, gives the error: “The font ‘ZurichBT-BoldItalic’ contains a bad /BBOX.”. The original input file has no problems.

I don’t really understand why.

Below is a test case application that will simply copy the input PDF. I can’t provide a sample of my own input PDF as it contains confidential information, but I’ll see about reproducing it with a small, simple file soon if this can’t be answered purely with code.

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.IO;

using iTextSharp;
using iTextSharp.text;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    PdfReader reader = new PdfReader("input.pdf");

    Document doc = new Document();
    PdfSmartCopy writer = new PdfSmartCopy(doc, new FileStream("output.pdf", fileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Write));

    doc.Open();

    for (int i = 1; i <= reader.NumberOfPages; i++)
    {
        //byte[] page = reader.GetPageContent(i);
        //string data = ExtractTextFromPDFBytes(page);
        if (true)//data.Contains("Search Token"))
        {
            doc.SetPageSize(reader.GetPageSizeWithRotation(i));
            doc.NewPage();
            PdfImportedPage iPage = writer.GetImportedPage(reader, i);
            writer.AddPage(iPage);
        }
    }
    doc.Close();
}

Any ideas? 🙂

edit with more information

Having obtained another copy of the input pdf I was using, it seems the problem is with the input pdf, although the original input pdf has no errors that are detected by Adobe Reader. I can’t share the exact file, which makes this difficult, but I’m wondering if anyone has any theories as to how this could come about? File corruption or errors not apparent in a source pdf, that become apparent in an output pdf after being run through iText’s pdfCopy or pdfSmartCopy functions?

Answer 1

This turned out to be due to a corrupt input PDF, even though no errors were apparent with the original source file. The code is fine, as BlackShadows indicates. Processing a different copy of the original source file resulted in correct output.