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Home » Newsletter » January 2012

By V. Subhash

In Version 4 of PDFOne, we introduced a new method GetPageElements() in the PdfDocument class.

ArrayList
  GetPageElements(int pageNum,
                  PDFPageImageElement elementTypes)

List
  GetPageElements(String pageRange,
                   PDFPageImageElement elementTypes)

This method returns a list containing PDFPageElement instances. But, PDFPageElement is the parent class of individual element classes, namely PDFPageCompositeElement, PDFPageImageElement, PDFPagePathElement, and PDFPageTextElement. You can directly access items in the returned list as instances of these derived classes.

The derived classes provide a lot more information about the retrieved page element. For example, with the PDFPageTextElement instance, you can not only find the actual text represented by the text element but also the location, font rotation (if any), and other details. In the following code snippet, we will see how this is done.

static void Main(string[] args) {
  PDFDocument PDFDocument1 = new PDFDocument("your-license-key");

  // Load PDF document
  PDFDocument1.Load("sample_doc.pdf");

  // Extract all image elements
  ArrayList ArrayList1 = PDFDocument1.GetPageElements(1, PDFPageElementType.IMAGE);

  // Save all image elements to file
  int n = ArrayList1.Count;
  Bitmap Bitmap1;
  for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
    PDFPageImageElement PDFPageImageElement1 = (PDFPageImageElement) ArrayList1[i];
    Bitmap1 = PDFPageImageElement1.GetImage();
    Bitmap1.Save("I:\\page" + (i+1).ToString() + ".bmp", ImageFormat.Bmp);
    Console.WriteLine("Image Element #" + (i + 1) + " (" +
                      PDFPageImageElement1.ImageHeight + " x " +
                      PDFPageImageElement1.ImageWidth + ")" + " saved to: " +
                      "page1_image" + (i + 1) + ".bmp");
  }

  // Extract all text elements
  ArrayList ArrayList2 = PDFDocument1.GetPageElements(1, PDFPageElementType.TEXT);

  // Save all image elements to file
  n = ArrayList2.Count;
  for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
    PDFPageTextElement PDFPageTextElement1 = (PDFPageTextElement) ArrayList2[i];
    Console.WriteLine("Text Element #" + (i + 1) + " \"" +
                      PDFPageTextElement1.Text + "\" uses font " +
                      PDFPageTextElement1.TextFontInfo.FontName);
  }

  // Close the document
  PDFDocument1.Close();
}

This code snippet tries to parse text and image elements in page 1 of a document. The text elements are displayed in the console while image elements are saved to a file. Here is the original document that was used to test this document.

Here is the output of the program when used with the above document. The output mentions the image and text elements that were found in page 1 of the document.

Here is the image element after it was saved to a file.