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Re: PS/PDF document analysis tool?

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In article <e07ac764-1455-45c4-8c75-
63ec62fe779b@o21g2000prn.googlegroups.com>, dmathog@gmail.com says...

> a fan of Adobe's bloated and difficult to uninstall software.) Is
> there perhaps some option in Ghostscript that can do this? 

Not that I'm aware of, though it would be 'possible' to do something 
like that.


> can take apart PS and PDF files and put them back together again it
> would seem that somewhere in the middle it must have a data structure
> containing the desired information.

Not really. The PDF file is interpreted, producing graphics objects 
representative of the original, but not the *same* as the original (in 
particular images are decompresased, metadata is mostly discarded etc). 
If you produce a PDF then these graphics primitives are emitted in a PDF 
form.

Nowhere is the original information maintained. You could pick up all 
kinds of useful statistics during interpretation of course, but I 
strongly suspect a dedicated tool would be easier to write.

You might also look at MuPDF (also from Artifex), that has a couple of 
tools which don't do what you want, but show how MuPDF might be used to 
achieve this goal (pdfclean and pdfshow). Pdfinfo which ships with the 
MuPDF source code does at least some of what you want, but I'm unsure 
how much. The source code can be found at:

http://mupdf.com/download/

The current version is mupdf-0.7.tar.gz for the source code. Given that 
it is supplied as source and does at least some of what you want it may 
be possible to extend it. I believe the author of the pdfinfo code would 
be interested in feedback and suggestions (he isn't an Artifex employee, 
but an open source contributor)


			Ken

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Re: PS/PDF document analysis tool? ken <ken@spamcop.net> - 2011-01-31 18:59 +0000
  Re: PS/PDF document analysis tool? Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org> - 2011-01-31 23:19 +0000
  Re: PS/PDF document analysis tool? David Mathog <dmathog@gmail.com> - 2011-01-31 12:28 -0800

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