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

Also good old GhostView (gv) shows coordinates.

Answer 2

Adobe Reader has it.

Edit->Analysis->Geospatial Location Tool

Answer 3

In case you don't want to install any heavy software for such a trivial task, you can create annotations in a xfdf file, set their location and then see which area is annotated in PDF.

You can use this template:

<xfdf xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/xfdf/" xml:space="preserve">
    <annots>
        <square style="solid" width="4" color="#000000" opacity="1" creationdate="D:20190624111403Z" flags="print" date="D:20190624111403Z" page="0" rect="0,0,135,390.6" subject="ROI" title="ROI" />
    </annots>
    <pdf-info version="2" xmlns="http://www.pdftron.com/pdfinfo" />
</xfdf>

Change the coordinates of the "rect" attribute, save the file as xfdf. Then, as you open the xfdf file in Adobe reader, the reader will ask for the location of the PDF file. Locate the PDF document, and you will see the rectangle drawn at the specified coordinates.

Answer 4

There is ImageMagick which is lighter than Gimp and gives you coordinates along your mouse pointer.

Answer 5

I was looking for a tool to get the co-ordinates to use extract option available in PDFBox library. Gimp way worked well for my purpose. I opened the PDF in Gimp and set the measuring unit to points.

Answer 6

I use InkScape v 0.91 to map out PDF rectangles for extracting text. It can load a PDF into the canvas. Don't forget to change the measurements to inches (Ctrl-Shift-D) with the document open for the document properties. For the Page property tab set the Default Units to inches, for the Grids property tab set Grid Units to inches. This page, PDF coordinates, explains the PDF coordinate system, and its unit of measurement.