GoTo/op.search char with position?

[khho]

Dear team,
I got the start and the end position of a string in PDF file. The first character in the file has position 0, the last the last .

How can I jump/goto/search to this character/string in the document?

I know how to search a string with

Code: Select all

Inst.Str2ID("op.search", false);

but I don't know how it works with position.


Cheers
khho

[zarkogajic]

Hi,

How can I jump/goto/search to this character/string in the document

Can you explain a bit more, maybe with a screen shot of the desired result ...

-žarko

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello zarkogajic,

Thanks for posting in this topic.
I did look at the JS API reference - and can not see a way to use the Search with ID positions, so this is likely not going to be possible, but as you said - some example will certainly help!

Kind regards,
Stefan

[NicoDN]

Is it still possible to jump to a specific position in the document via the API? For example, to the 200th character in the document?

Regards
Nico

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hello NicoDN,

Welcome to our forums.

PDF files are not "flowing text" ones - so there could be one object per character, and not a single "word" of text that is one object. As such determining which is the 200th character in a file might be tricky. As such you can navigate to a precise coordinate position, but as far as I am aware you can't really go to the position of a specific character symbol (without grabbing the coordinates of that first which I am not sure is possible using JS alone).

Kind regards,
Stefan

[khho]

Hello zarkogajic,

Thanks for posting in this topic.
I did look at the JS API reference - and can not see a way to use the Search with ID positions, so this is likely not going to be possible, but as you said - some example will certainly help!

Kind regards,
Stefan

Hi again,
as an example: in the the attached screenshot I found '456' by text search. I want to find, goto and highlight it by 'searching' the text position.

khho

[zarkogajic]

Hi,

You want to programmatically do what the "Find" dialog does: search for some text and have it highlighted?

-žarko

[NicoDN]

For example: We are looking for the text “This is a test”. But it should only be marked once. We know that the text to be marked is to be searched for after character position 100.
So the challenge is to mark a text that can occur several times in the document but should only be marked once at a specific character position

1.png

[khho]

Hi,

You want to programmatically do what the "Find" dialog does: search for some text and have it highlighted?

-žarko

Dear -žarko,
no, I know how to search programmatically (see my first posting).
I want to go to text at position 4, highlight 4 to 6 programmatically.

Cheers,
khho

[zarkogajic]

Hi NicoDN,

[Are you working together with "khho" user?]

Please note what Stefan replied: viewtopic.php?p=193235#p193235

PDF documents are not plain text files or Word documents - where it makes sense to talk about "word / character position". In a PDF document text can be over other text and in a different layer .. etc...

However, try the following (pseudo):

IPXC_Page _page = IPXC_Document.GetPage
IPXC_PageText _pageText = _page.GetText
_pageText.Get_LinesCount

for each line
_pageText.Get_LineInfo
_pageText.GetChars

In theory (I have not tried) you then look for your searched-for-string inside sChars and also increment nCharsCount for each processed line. Note that your searched-for-string can span between multiple lines.

Once you have found your searched-for-string, you need to get the PXC_Rect of the searched-for-string using _pageText.CharRect.

And finally, IPXV_Document.AddNewHighlighter.Add(page, ...)

HTH.

p.s.
Not an official support person

-žarko

[Daniel - PDF-XChange]

Hello,

Thank you Zarko!

In addition to what you have mentioned here, and I believe Stefan touched on it in the other thread, but I wanted to iterate on it a bit in this topic. Since PDF uses a coordinate based system, there will be times where the text in "content order" is not in alignment with the visual order.

One very common example of this is headers/footers, which often are all collected together, either all as the "first" or "last" few text items on a page. This would negatively impact your ability to accurately account for the character position in the context of each page.

You could also run into cases where some text is contained inside of nested Xform items, and you may encounter many cases where documents have dozens of invisible characters for no discernable reason on one line, and then on the next, it is properly formatted, and there is no space character at all between the text in two separate cells from a table.

Kind regards,