Text Location and Contents

[tdonovan]

I have been working with the viewer to determine what text is within an area of the screen and what the location of that text is. I have it working but I am not 100% confident I have dealt with all of the issues. Rotation of the page, rotation of the text all seem to impact the items.

It seems that your highlight feature has to deal with all of these issues. Is there a sample that would show what it does, or is there routines that it uses that we can use.

Thanks

[Vasyl - PDF-XChange]

Hi, Tom.

I have been working with the viewer to determine what text is within an area of the screen and what the location of that text is. I have it working but I am not 100% confident I have dealt with all of the issues. Rotation of the page, rotation of the text all seem to impact the items.

You may obtain quad (four points on the pdf-page, parallelogram, relative to page's MediaBox) for each character on the page.
Look to [Reference/NamedItems/Objects/Documents/Item/Pages/Item/Text/Chars...]:

Code: Select all

ctrl.GetDocumentProperty(docId, "Pages[<pageIndex>].Text.Chars[<charIndex>].Quad.Value", out dataOut, 0); // dataOut will contain 8 numbers

or you may obtain composite quads for characters range on the page:

Code: Select all

ctrl.DoDocumentVerb(docId, "Pages[<pageIndex>].Text", "GetQuads", dataIn(<Start>, <Len>), out dataOut, 0); // dataOut will contain some quads

The quad does not include the page rotation, document view rotation, etc. You may use directly these coordinates for creating new annotations for example.
Currently exist one way to obtain coordinates with included actual rotation, scaling, offset (in points, not in pixels):

Code: Select all

string js = 
"m = (new Matrix2D).fromRotated(this, 0);
a = new Array;
a[0] = <pageX>;
a[1] = <pageY>;
... // other points
b = m.transform(a);
b;"
// <pageX>, <pageY> - coordinates of point on the page, relative to page's media box
string res;
ctrl.RunJavaScript(js, out res, ...); // res will contain the new coordinates separated by comma

HTH

[tdonovan]

THe reference to it's relataive to the media box helped a great deal. Thank you.

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]