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FDF is Adobe's pdf format for form data. It's mostly a pile of name/value
pairs and a reference to a PDF file. It's also used for other things, like
seperating comments from the actual PDF being commented on.
Here's a little sample FDF. I took a real one and ripped out most of the
extranious stuff, and added a lot of spaces to make it more legible. This
sets the value of a couple form fields. The vast majority of the whitespace
in this sample is optional.
----------------------
%FDF-1.2
1 0 obj
<< /FDF
<<
/F (pathToPDF.pdf)
/Fields [
<< /T (fieldTitle1) /V (field value 1) >>
<< /T (fieldTitle2) /V (field value 2) >>
]
>>
>>
endobj
trailer
<</Root 1 0 R>>
%%EOF
----------------------
The FDF you'll be interested in will be a bit more complex. It will contain
all the information on all the comments that acrobat needs to recreate them
in another file. You'll probably be able to ignore most of it.
Oh, and I found that acrobat 6 can still export comments to FDF. They just
moved it: "Document->Export comments..."
Textual comments (notes) will be fairly simple to extract. Determining
which text is being highlighted, underlined, or struck through will be
considerably more challenging.
What kinds of comments are you dealing with, and to what end?
--Mark Storer
Software Engineer
Cardiff Software
#include <disclaimer>
typdef std::disclaimer<Cardiff> Discard;
-----Original Message-----
From: Abbey Landis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 1:24 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [PDFdev] can i organize my pdf documents
Mark, I appreciate your time on this.
I am not familiar with FDF, sorry, can you explain?
Thanks,
Abbey Landis
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Storer
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 12:29 PM
Subject: RE: [PDFdev] can i organize my pdf documents
Acrobat 6 has an "export comments to word..." file menu item. You could
call it from script. When I tried it just now it told me that "this
operation requires word 2002 to be installed on your system".
Bah! Humbug...
In acrobat 5, the file->export->comments function will do basically the same
thing, but will export an FDF (not requiring someone elses tech is always
nice). FDF's are pretty simple to parse... crack it open in the text editor
of your choice, you'll see.
The code-your-own-plugin method is quite possible, if non-trivial.
for each page:
1) Located the highlight regoins
2) Find all the text entirely under on of those regions. I understand that
the word-finder has undergone a major overhaul in the acrobat 6.
3) Export that text in whatever format you like.
--Mark Storer
Software Engineer
Cardiff Software
#include <disclaimer>
typdef std::disclaimer<Cardiff> Discard;
-----Original Message-----
From: Abbey Landis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 7:00 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PDFdev] can i organize my pdf documents
Hello All
thank you for reading this question:
If I wanted to take a certain number of pdf doucments which I have
highlighted (using the adobe highlighter feature) and export that data into
a file (text, spreadsheet, etc) can this be done?
Will this be complicated/hard?
Thanks,
Abbey Landis
Ps: for some reason, the email i registered with ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is
stating my email box is full. Don't know why, but if you do experience that,
can you then try sending the answer to [EMAIL PROTECTED] instead.
Again, thanks.
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