PDF Text and Image Removal

Question

Hello,

I was wondering if there is a way to remove text and images from a PDF. My goal is to create two images, one being just the text and the other the images.

I tried to looking at the following SDKs but didn't find what I was looking for:

• Pegasus PDFXpress
• Tall Components
• LeadTools

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could use PDFSharp - I think you can do that with this library (pdfsharp)

Answer 2

A traditional PDF file comprises a number of instructions for a Postscript printer or display driver to draw some shapes. You might interpret the resulting shapes as being words, but when you see a capital D, say, there's no reason why the gylph that makes up the vertical bar on the left of the glyph and the glyph that makes up the curve on the right have to be adjacent to each other in the PDF, or even close to each other.

There are tools (and toolkits) that would allow you to OCR the document to get the text.

But the question is essentially meaningless: there is no text in a PDF, only instructions to draw things.

Edit: Tagged PDF files do include text, traditional PDFs do not and do not have a concept of a logical reading order or differentiation between any content. But concluding that because one has seen text in a PDF once therefore implies that all PDFs contain text would be bad logic.

Answer 3

The LEADTOOLS SDK is capable of performing the above described task using our auto zoning functionality. The auto zoning is capable of detecting text, graphic, and table zones without actually performing OCR on the text. We have actually posted a sample application with this functionality at the below link. We also provide an OCR engine capable of extracting the text and saving it to a searchable PDF if that ever becomes part of your requirements.

http://support.leadtools.com/CS/forums/28142/ShowPost.aspx#28142

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