Manipulating PDF files

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Overview
Simple operations on PDF files in WLanguage
Manipulating the content of a PDF file in WLanguage

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Manipulating PDF files

Overview

PDF is one of the most widely used formats for sending and storing electronic documents.

Several methods can be used to create or manipulate PDF files:

Creating PDF files when printing: PDF files can be created when printing via the report editor or via WLanguage.
For more details, see Printing to PDF.
Viewing PDF files via the PDF Reader control.
For more details, see The PDF Reader control.
Simple operations on PDF files in WLanguage: Check protection, extract a page, merge PDFs, etc.
Manipulating the content of a PDF file in WLanguage using different types of variables.

Simple operations on PDF files in WLanguage

Several functions can be used to perform simple operations on PDF files. These functions allow you to directly manipulate a PDF file:


PDFExtractPage	Extracts a page from a PDF file in a variable of type Image.
PDFIsProtected	Checks whether the PDF file requires a password in order to be read.
PDFMerge	Merges several existing PDF files into a single PDF file. The files are merged one after another. The paths of PDF files can be found in an array.
PDFMergeWithPassword	Merges several existing and password-protected PDF files into a single PDF file.
PDFNumberOfPages	Returns the total number of pages found in a PDF file.
PDFPassword	Protects a PDF document with a password.
PDFSign	Applies an approval signature to an existing PDF.
PDFToText	Extracts text from a PDF file.

Manipulating the content of a PDF file in WLanguage

To easily manipulate the content of a PDF file, WLanguage offers different types of variables:


pdfAttachment	The pdfAttachment type is used to define all the advanced characteristics of an attachment in a PDF document.
pdfDocument	The pdfDocument type gets all the characteristics of a PDF file: author, date created, page content, etc.
pdfPage	The pdfPage type is used to define all the advanced characteristics of a page from a PDF document loaded in memory.
pdfParameter	The pdfParameter type defines all the characteristics of the PDF file to be generated.
pdfSignature	The pdfSignature type is used to define the advanced characteristics of the signature that will be applied to a PDF file when signing an existing PDF (via PDFSign).
pdfTextElement	The pdfTextElement type is used to find out all the characteristics of a text element in a PDF page.

The pdfDocument variable loads the content of a PDF file into memory. For example:

MyPDF is pdfDocument = PDFOpen("test.pdf")

MySecondPDF is pdfDocument = "C:\temp\examplePDF.pdf"

You can use this variable to access the pages of the PDF document and the text of each page. For example:

MyPDF is pdfDocument = "test.pdf"

FOR EACH DocumentPage OF MyPDF.Page
FOR EACH PageElement OF DocumentPage.TextElement
Trace(PageElement.Text)
END
END

With these types of variables, it is possible to delete or add pages to a document using array functions (Add, Delete, etc. ) directly on the array of pdfPage variables contained in the pdfDocument variable.

Example:

MyPDFDoc is pdfDocument = PDFOpen("C:\temp\Myguide.pdf")
Trace(MyPDFDoc.PDFVersion)
Trace(MyPDFDoc.Author)
Trace(MyPDFDoc.Page.Count)
Trace(MyPDFDoc.Page[1].Width)
Trace(MyPDFDoc.Page[36].Height)
FOR EACH ATextElement OF MyPDFDoc.Page[2].TextElement
Trace(ATextElement.Text + " X = " +
ATextElement.X + " Y = " + ATextElement.Y + " L = " +
ATextElement.Width + " H = " + ATextElement.Height)
END
MyPDFDoc2 is pdfDocument = "C:\temp\plan.pdf"
// Add pages
Add(MyPDFDoc2.Page, MyPDFDoc.Page[5])
// Insert pages
Insert(MyPDFDoc2.Page, 1, MyPDFDoc.Page[32])
// Save modified PDF
PDFSave(MyPDFDoc2, "MyPDFDoc2.pdf")
ShellExecute("MyPDFDoc2.pdf")

You can use specific PDF functions to manipulate pdfDocument variables:


PDFAddImage	Adds an image to a page in an existing PDF file.
PDFAddWatermark	Adds a watermark to all or some pages of an existing PDF file.
PDFClose	Closes the PDF file loaded in memory in a pdfDocument variable.
New in version 2024 PDFExtractPage	Extracts a page from a PDF file in a variable of type Image.
PDFGetSignature	Gets the signature of a PDF document as a buffer.
PDFGetSignatureDate	Gets the date of one of the signatures of a PDF document.
PDFNbSignatures	Gets the number of signatures in a PDF document.
PDFOpen	Opens a PDF document and loads it in a pdfDocument variable.
PDFSave	Saves the content of a pdfDocument variable in a ".PDF" file.
New in version 2024 PDFSign	Applies an approval signature to an existing PDF.
New in version 2024 PDFToText	Extracts text from a PDF file.

Remark: Binding to the PDF Reader control:

A pdfDocument variable can be assigned to a PDF Reader control.
A PDF document from a PDF Reader control can be retrieved in a pdfDocument variable.
Example:
MyPDFDoc is pdfDocument
MyPDFDoc = PDF_PDFReader