Best tool tool for inspecting PDF files?

Question

What tool do you recommend for inspecting PDF files?

Use case: I'm trying to programmatically generate PDF files (using iText). I'm having trouble achieving certain layouts, but I have PDF files with text laid out the way I want (generated from Word). I would like to reverse engineer how they do it.

PDF Inspector seems to be good, but I'm looking for something for Windows.

Answer 1

I've used PDFBox with good success. Here's a sample of what the code looks like (back from version 0.7.2), that likely came from one of the provided examples:

// load the document
System.out.println("Reading document: " + filename);
PDDocument doc = null;                                                                                                                                                                                                          
doc = PDDocument.load(filename);

// look at all the document information
PDDocumentInformation info = doc.getDocumentInformation();
COSDictionary dict = info.getDictionary();
List l = dict.keyList();
for (Object o : l) {
    //System.out.println(o.toString() + " " + dict.getString(o));
    System.out.println(o.toString());
}

// look at the document catalog
PDDocumentCatalog cat = doc.getDocumentCatalog();
System.out.println("Catalog:" + cat);

List<PDPage> lp = cat.getAllPages();
System.out.println("# Pages: " + lp.size());
PDPage page = lp.get(4);
System.out.println("Page: " + page);
System.out.println("\tCropBox: " + page.getCropBox());
System.out.println("\tMediaBox: " + page.getMediaBox());
System.out.println("\tResources: " + page.getResources());
System.out.println("\tRotation: " + page.getRotation());
System.out.println("\tArtBox: " + page.getArtBox());
System.out.println("\tBleedBox: " + page.getBleedBox());
System.out.println("\tContents: " + page.getContents());
System.out.println("\tTrimBox: " + page.getTrimBox());
List<PDAnnotation> la = page.getAnnotations();
System.out.println("\t# Annotations: " + la.size());

Answer 2

Adobe Acrobat has a very cool but rather well hidden mode allowing you to inspect PDF files. I wrote a blog article explaining it at http://pdf.jpedal.org/java-pdf-blog/bid/10479/Viewing-PDF-objects

Answer 3

The object viewer in Acrobat is good but Windjack Solution's PDF Canopener allows better inspection with an eyedropper for selecting objects on page. Also permits modifications to be made to PDF.

http://www.windjack.com/products/pdfcanopener.html