Extract, Edit and Replace Images with a PDF

[jeffp]

I looking for a way to extract, edit, and then replace an image in a PDF.

Is this something you are considering for version 3 of the ActiveX Viewer? Below are some more details on what I'm asking and why I'm asking.

There is a product out there that you are probably familiar with called PaperPort by Nuance. Many PaperPort users have become very dissatisfied with the recent releases of the product and have been searching for alternatives. Nuance doesn't seem to be devoting many resources to this product anymore since it has other product lines that bring in much greater revenue. This is probably the reason the quality of the product is declining.

Most PaperPort customers are converting paper into PDFs via scanning. As such, there are a few features that PaperPort's customers have become very accustomed to. One of them is the ability to edit/manipulate the resulting PDF scan once its one the computer. I took a look at PaperPort to see how this was done and here's what I found.

With the PDF in view, you click a button that extracts the actual image in the PDF document into a separate image viewer. Then in this image viewer, you get the ability to manipulate the image with features such as an eraser, deskew, depeckle, smooth, draw lines and rectangle, etc. Then once done, you click OK and the edited image is now placed back into the PDF file replacing the original image.

This is a pretty nice concept if you're doing a lot of scanning and need to touch up some of the bad images.

In looking over the current features in the ActiveX Viewer, this doesn't appear to be possible since there doesn't appear to be the ability to extract, replace, or delete an image embedded into the PDF page.

Before I head down any path, I just wanted to see if this was a feature/concept that you either have slated for version 3 or are interested in looking into. I know you base much of your feature sets on what Adobe is doing, but this is one area that Adobe hasn't done much with. The whole concept of being able to extract, manipulate, and replace an image in a PDF file is pretty cool and can be very useful to users.

At the very least, I would need the ability to extract, delete, and insert an image into a PDF with the ActiveX Viewer SDK so that I could implement something like this myself.

Thanks for the consideration.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

Hi jeffp,

at present only PDF-Tools offers the ability to directly extract imaged from a PDF. We intend adding some image extraction features into V3 pf the Viewer but at this point we have not made any final decisions as to how that will function or what the user interface for it should be.

For the time being you might want to make use of the "Snapshot Tool" which will copy to the Windows clipboard as an image an area defined by a bounding box drawn with the mouse. This could then be pasted into your favourite image application, edited then copy/pasted back into the document using PDF-XChange Viewer.

hth

[jeffp]

Yes, I saw the PDF tools allows me to extract an image, but to accomplish what I've described I would need to delete that image and replace it with my edited image. This would requre a delete image and insert image functionality. I see that I can insert and image into a page, but is there a way to delete or remove and image from a PDF page?

Ideally, I would like this functionality in the ActiveX Viewer so I don't have to save out a page to file, open it in PDF tools, make the changes, and then add the page back to the Viewer. A "replace" image function would be nice.

The snapshot won't quit get me there. My users will want the edits to be on the actual embeded image itself.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

sorry jeffp

at present this is not a possibility. Specifically our Viewer will not delete any original content from a PDF file, you can only place something on top to mask content. The dev team leader tells me we have some plans to make editing of images possible, but it is too early for now to say it will be implemented for sure. Please do not consider this a promise to deliver but an acknowledgment that we are aware of the issue and giving it our consideration.

hth

[jeffp]

I just wanted to follow up on this post that I did a while back. We continue to get requests for the ability to edit the underlying image in a PDF page. Typically, this is after scanning a paper document to PDF and then wanting to straighten the image, erase some stray marks, etc.

Do you have a better idea a this point of the image features you will include in V3. At minimum it would be nice to quickly extract and resinsert an image. I can to the image maniputation outside the Viewer, but would need to ability to get and reset it.

Thanks.

--Jeff

[jeffp]

Any more ideas on where you'll go with this. The biggest single request we get is the ability to fix/straighten/touch-up a scanned image. As mentioned in this thread, we can handle the image editing, we just need the ability to remove and then return the image to the PDF once we edit it, all inside the ViewerAX.

[Vasyl - PDF-XChange]

Hi, jeffp.

I'm afraid, but it is impossible with current version of ViewAx SDK. You will be able to do that (and a lot more) but only with the new version of this SDK (V3)...

Best
Regards.

[jeffp]

That's fine. I just wanted to make sure it was planned for v3.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]