There must be a better way.
Not as far as I know. If you need to find not only the text but the actual positioning of the label containing that text, you're going to have to parse the entire structure. I don't know that doing that using Data::Dumper rather than CAM::PDF or PDF::API2's internal methods is a good idea, but no matter how you slice it, you basically have to mimic the rendering process (parsing the page tree) to get the actual page positions of the text.

And even then, if you are searching for a substring you'll only have the position of the text container, not the position of the substring itself. To get the position of the substring would require actually rendering the PDF, complete with its fonts.

In reply to Re: PDF::API2 to search for text in PDF file by bellaire
in thread PDF::API2 to search for text and place hyperlinks in PDF file by knbknb

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