FREE Tool for watching coordinates in PDF

Question

Is there any tool in some PDF Viewer/Editor like Acrobat, Evince, etc. where I can navigate and watch coordinates(i.e. (x,y)) of any selected point in PDF-document?

Answer 1

Apache PDFBox PDFDebugger 2.0.* displays PDF coordinates in the status bar. Get it here: https://pdfbox.apache.org/download.cgi

Download the pdfbox-app-2.0.*.jar available under command line tools on above link. Then run the below command with the required file.

  java -jar pdfbox-app-2.0.*.jar PDFDebugger "InputFile" 

You would be able to see the coordinates by hovering the mouse on pdf page. You can select a particular page from left hand side and corresponding page will be displayed on right. Note pdf displays coordinates from lower left of the page so if you want to extract some text using these coordinates you need to subtract the y axis from the total height and then use it. In case of below example you will have to use x:47 y:(792-522)=270

The 3.0.0 version has a few extra features unrelated to this question: https://repository.apache.org/content/groups/snapshots/org/apache/pdfbox/pdfbox-debugger/3.0.0-SNAPSHOT/