in reply to Replacing text in a PDF file

Isn't the data in a PDF-file zipped? If so, this would make it almost impossible to do a straight replacement.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

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Re: Re: Replacing text in a PDF file
by castaway (Parson) on Jun 18, 2003 at 11:04 UTC
    Not at all, where did you get that idea from? (Try looking at one in a normal editor, its just a description language similar to postscript)

    Update: Apparently not quite true, though I've never seen one with binary data in yet..

    C.

[reply]
      ...some of it is, but the default for most apps is to compress the text/graphic streams (page description etc. seems to be left alone). It would seem though, that you can switch this off in some PDF-creation tools (eg Illustrator, apparently), leaving plain-text strings in the file suitable for simple regex-ing.

      Cheers,Ben.

[reply]

      Well, that's exactly what I did: the ones that I looked at did not have any recognizable text.

      CountZero

      "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

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