Text coordinates when stripping from PDFBox

by

This is just another case of the excessive PdfTextStripper coordinate normalization. Just like you I had thought that by using TextPosition.getTextMatrix() (instead of getX() and getY) one would get the actual coordinates, but no, even these matrix values have to be corrected (at least in PDFBox 2.0.x, I haven’t checked 1.8.x) because the matrix is multiplied by a translation making the lower left corner of the crop box the origin.

Thus, in your case (in which the lower left of the crop box is not the origin), you have to correct the values, e.g. by replacing

        float x = minx;
        float y = firstPosition.getTextMatrix().getTranslateY();

by

        PDRectangle cropBox = doc.getPage(0).getCropBox();

        float x = minx + cropBox.getLowerLeftX();
        float y = firstPosition.getTextMatrix().getTranslateY() + cropBox.getLowerLeftY();

Instead of

without correction

you now get

with x,y correction

Obviously, though, you will also have to correct the height somewhat. This is due to the way the PdfTextStripper determines the text height:

    // 1/2 the bbox is used as the height todo: why?
    float glyphHeight = bbox.getHeight() / 2;

(from showGlyph(...) in LegacyPDFStreamEngine, the parent class of PdfTextStripper)

While the font bounding box indeed usually is too large, half of it often is not enough.

More Related Contents:

  1. How to merge two PDF files into one in Java?
  2. how to add unicode in truetype0font on pdfbox 2.0.0?
  3. pdfbox 2.0.2 > Calling of PageDrawer.processPage method caught exceptions
  4. How to generate multiple lines in PDF using Apache pdfbox
  5. Apache PDFBox: problems with encoding
  6. How to insert an PDPage within another PDPage with pdfbox
  7. Filter out all text above a certain font size from PDF
  8. Parsing PDF files (especially with tables) with PDFBox
  9. Using PDFBox to write UTF-8 encoded strings to a PDF [duplicate]
  10. PdfBox encode symbol currency euro
  11. extract images from pdf using pdfbox
  12. Is it possible to justify text in PDFBOX?
  13. Writing Arabic with PDFBOX with correct characters presentation form without being separated
  14. remove invisible text from pdf using pdfbox
  15. PDFBox : PDPageContentStream’s append mode misbehaving
  16. Watermarking with PDFBox
  17. pdfBox – Signature validity checkmark not visible in Acrobat reader
  18. PDFBox: Problem with converting pdf page into image
  19. Converting PDF to multipage tiff (Group 4)
  20. Reading a particular page from a PDF document using PDFBox
  21. Extract Image from PDF using Java
  22. how to know if a field is on a particular page?
  23. PDFBox 2.0 RC3 — Find and replace text
  24. I need to create a list that has both colums 1 and 2 equal [closed]
  25. Mongodb Increment value inside nested array
  26. Didn’t find class “androidx.core.app.CoreComponentFactory”
  27. Is there any XPath processor for SAX model?
  28. How can I change the EditText text without triggering the Text Watcher?
  29. Inserting null to an Integer column using JDBC
  30. Default access modifier for a Java constructor

Leave a Comment