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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T21:25:58+00:00

In a current project i need to display PDFs in a webpage. Right now

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In a current project i need to display PDFs in a webpage. Right now we are embedding them with the Adobe PDF Reader but i would rather have something more elegant (the reader does not integrate well, it can not be overlaid with transparent regions, …).

I envision something close google documents, where they display PDFs as image but also allow text to be selected and copied out of the PDF (an requirement we have).

Does anybody know how they do this? Or of any library we could use to obtain a comparable result?

I know we could split the PDFs into images on server side, but this would not allow for the selection of text …

Thanks in advance for any help

PS: Java based project, using wicket.

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  1. Editorial Team

    I have some suggestions, but it’ll be definitely hard to implement this stuff. Good luck!

    First approach:

    First, use a library like pdf-renderer (https://pdf-renderer.dev.java.net/) to convert the PDF into an image. Store these images on your server or use a caching-technique. Converting PDF into an image is not hard.

    Then, use the Type Select JavaScript library (http://www.typeselect.org/) to overlay textual data over your text. This text is selectable, while the real text is still in the original image. To get the original text, see the next approach, or do it yourself, see the conclusion.

    The original text then must be overlaid on the image, which is a pain.

    Second approach:

    The PDF specifications allow textual information to be linked to a Font. Most documents use a subset of Type-3 or Type-1 fonts which (often) use a standard character set (I thought it was Unicode, but not sure). If your PDF document does not contain a standard character set, (i.e. it has defined it’s own) it’s impossible to know what characters are which glyphs (symbols) and thus are you unable to convert to a textual representation.

    Read the PDF document, read the graphics-objects, parse the instructions (use the PDF specification for more insight in this process) for rendering text, converting them to HTML. The HTML conversion can select appropriate tags (like <H1> and <p>, but also <b> and <i>) based on the parameters of the fonts (their names and attributes) used and the instructions (letter spacing, line spacing, size, face) in the graphics-objects.
    You can use the pdf-renderer library for reading and parsing the PDF files and then code a HTML translator yourself. This is not easy, and it does not cover all cases of PDF documents.

    In this approach you will lose the original look of the document. There are some PDF generation libraries which do not use the Adobe Font techniques. This also is a problem with the first approach, even you can see it you can not select it (but equal behavior with the official Adobe Reader, thus not a big deal you’d might say).

    Conclusion:

    You can choose the first approach, the second approach or both.

    I wouldn’t go in the direction of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) since it’s really overkill in such a problem, since it also has several drawbacks. This approach is Google using. If there are characters which are unrecognized, a human being does the processing.

    If you are into the human-processing thing; you can only use the Type Select library and PDF to Image conversion and do the OCR yourself, which is probably the easiest (human as a machine = intelligently cheap, lol) way to solve the problem.

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