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That’s news to me and Bluebeam’s PDF search feature! It turns out you can make PDFs (This usually happens with architectural drawings) that are comprised purely
by quickthrowman 6y ago
That’s news to me and Bluebeam’s PDF search feature! It turns out you can make PDFs (This usually happens with architectural drawings) that are comprised purely of images that are not searchable, and therefore you are wrong.
I silently thank every architect that provides searchable PDFs, it makes my job way easier
- mkl 6y agoGP is right. The code that makes up a PDF is text-based. Those images can be encoded in the PDF file using the ASCIIHexDecode filter, i.e. as editable ASCII text code.
- xfer 6y agoYes just use a hex editor and every data is text-based.
- mkl 6y agoOnly the "binary" bits like fonts and bitmap images would need to be hex (and then only so Notepad doesn't mangle them). Everything else in an uncompressed PDF is already text. Go here and download the PDF spec.: https://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html https://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html Look at Chapter 3, Syntax (and the rest of it, really). I literally have scripts that use bash and sed, or Python, to modify PDFs by editing the text code. Doing it in Notepad is possible but tricky, as there's a table of object byte offsets near the end that it's easy to mess up by inserting a character.
- yunohn 6y agoGP uses the phrases "losslessly convert to text" and "fill in the forms". I think you've misunderstood them, they're clearly talking about the display text, and not the code that comprises it.