HOW TO MAKE PDF EX-CHANNGE TO PICK UP QUANTITY OF SYMBOL IN PDF DRAWING PLAN OF ENGINEERING WORK

[PaulaHeaman]

"How can I use PDF-X-Change Editor to count or extract the number of different symbols, such as light fixtures, switches, and sockets, where each symbol has a different shape — and get a total count of each type of symbol on a specific page of the drawing?"
Lighting Quantity.jpg
Similar to how it's done with images, the system can generate a count of each type of symbol
Attachments
image.png

[Sean - PDF-XChange]

Hi Paula, welcome to the forum.

I'm afraid what you requested is not possible with PDF-XChange Editor - sorry we couldn't help you this time.

Kind regards,

[Mathew]

I think a similar request has been made in the past. If those items were in the pdf as stamps or comments, rather than base content, they would be trivially easy to count with javascript, and I've posted a script that could do that.

Once they become part of the base content, you would need some type of image recognition to determine if the shape matched because they are just line segments. Maybe if there was some type of xform data associated with them, it could be done, but that would relate to the software used to create the pdf. PDF XChange does have similar capability built-in already (for OCR of text) so theoretically it could be possible. It would be very challenging to implement, though, because the symbol rotations can vary.

One way to handle this with the currently available tools would be to highlight those symbols with different colored free highlights, then run the tool I linked above. It could give a count of all the different color highlights. One step further would be to set custom names for the different highlight colors, and these could show up in the report.

image.png

Then highlight on the drawing:

image(2).png

From the Report Comments tool:

image(1).png

Results in this report:

image(3).png

[Sean - PDF-XChange]

Hi Mathew,

Thanks for the input - that's very effective and a good option for users in this case.

Kind regards,