Question

I’ve created a pdf with a table using itextsharp. I found an example at http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ch05.html. Now I’d like to read data from the table again using itextsharp. I can’t find any documentation on how to read this data. Can someone give me an example?

Answer 1

Unfortunately you can’t do this in iTextSharp. The section entitled “Advanced: reading PDF” on the iTextSharp page at SourceForge says:

The pdf format is just a canvas where
text and graphics are placed without
any structure information. As such
there aren’t any ‘iText-objects’ in a
PDF file. In each page there will
probably be a number of ‘Strings’, but
you can’t reconstruct a phrase or a
paragraph using these strings. There
are probably a number of lines drawn,
but you can’t retrieve a Table-object
based on these lines. In short:
parsing the content of a PDF-file is
NOT POSSIBLE with iText. Post your
question on the newsgroup
news://comp.text.pdf and maybe you
will get some answers from people that
have built tools that can parse PDF
and extract some of its contents, but
don’t expect tools that will perform a
bullet-proof conversion to structured
text.