How to get font color using pdfbox

Question

I am trying to extract text with all information from the pdf using pdfbox. I got all the information i want, except color. I tried different ways to get the fontcolor (incl

Answer 1

I tried the code in the link you posted and it worked for me. The colors I get back are 148.92, 179.01001 and 214.965. I wish I could give you my PDF to work with, maybe if I store it externally to SO? My PDF used a sort of palish blue color and that seems to match. It was just one page of text created in Word 2010 and exported, nothing too intense.

A couple of suggestions ....

1. Recall that the value returned is a float between 0 and 1. If a value is accidentally cast to int, then of course the values will end up containing nearly all 0. The linked to code multiples by 255 to get a range of 0 to 255.
2. As the commenter said, the most common color for a PDF file is black which is 0 0 0

That is all I can think of now, otherwise I have version of 1.7.1 of pdfbox and fontbox and like I said I pretty much followed the link you gave.

EDIT

Based upon my comments, here perhaps is a minorly invasive way of doing it for pdf files like color.pdf?

In PDFStreamEngine.java in the processOperator method one can do inside the try block

if (operation.equals("RG")) {
   // stroking color space
   System.out.println(operation);
   System.out.println(arguments);
} else if (operation.equals("rg")) {
   // non-stroking color space
   System.out.println(operation);
   System.out.println(arguments);
} else if (operation.equals("BT")) {
   System.out.println(operation);    
} else if (operation.equals("ET")) {
   System.out.println(operation);           
}

This will show you the information, then it is up to you to process the color information for each section according to your needs. Here is a snippet from the beginning of the output of the above code when run on color.pdf ...

BT rG [COSInt(1), COSInt(0), CosInt(0)] RG [COSInt(1), COSInt(0), CosInt(0)] ET BT ET BT rG [COSFloat{0.573}, COSFloat{0.816}, COSFloat{0.314}] RG [COSFloat{0.573}, COSFloat{0.816}, COSFloat{0.314}] ET ......

You see in the above output an empty BT ET section, this being a section which is marked DEVICEGRAY. All the other give you [0,1] values for the R, G and B components

Answer 2

I also ended up doing something like this. Pasting code below, hope it helps someone.

import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.List;
import org.apache.pdfbox.exceptions.COSVisitorException;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDPage;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.edit.PDPageContentStream;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDFont;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDType1Font;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.graphics.PDGraphicsState;
import org.apache.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper;
import org.apache.pdfbox.util.ResourceLoader;
import org.apache.pdfbox.util.TextPosition;

public class Parser extends PDFTextStripper {

public Parser() throws IOException {
    super(ResourceLoader.loadProperties(
            "org/apache/pdfbox/resources/PageDrawer.properties", true));
    super.setSortByPosition(true);
}

public void parse(String path) throws IOException{
    PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(path);
    List<PDPage> pages = doc.getDocumentCatalog().getAllPages();
    for (PDPage page : pages) {
        this.processStream(page, page.getResources(), page.getContents().getStream());
    }
}

@Override
protected void processTextPosition(TextPosition text) {
    try {
        PDGraphicsState graphicsState = getGraphicsState();
        System.out.println("R = " + graphicsState.getNonStrokingColor().getJavaColor().getRed());
        System.out.println("G = " + graphicsState.getNonStrokingColor().getJavaColor().getGreen());
        System.out.println("B = " + graphicsState.getNonStrokingColor().getJavaColor().getBlue());
    }
    catch (IOException ioe) {}

}

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, COSVisitorException {
    Parser p = new Parser();
    p.parse("/Users/apple/Desktop/123.pdf");
}

}

Answer 3

I found some code in one of my maintenance program.
I do not know it works for you or not, please try It. Also check out this link http://pdfbox.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/pdfbox/pdmodel/common/class-use/PDStream.html

It may help you

PDDocument doc = null;
try {
    doc = PDDocument.load("C:/Path/To/Pdf/Sample.pdf");
    PDFStreamEngine engine = new PDFStreamEngine(ResourceLoader.loadProperties("org/apache/pdfbox/resources/PageDrawer.properties"));
    PDPage page = (PDPage)doc.getDocumentCatalog().getAllPages().get(0);
    engine.processStream(page, page.findResources(), page.getContents().getStream());
    PDGraphicsState graphicState = engine.getGraphicsState();
    System.out.println(graphicState.getStrokingColor().getColorSpace().getName());
    float colorSpaceValues[] = graphicState.getStrokingColor().getColorSpaceValue();
    for (float c : colorSpaceValues) {
        System.out.println(c * 255);
    }
}
finally {
    if (doc != null) {
        doc.close();
    }

Answer 4

With the pdfbox verson 2.0+ it is necessary to choose these operators in the constructor of your overwritten PDFTextStripper:

addOperator(new SetStrokingColorSpace());
addOperator(new SetNonStrokingColorSpace());
addOperator(new SetStrokingDeviceCMYKColor());
addOperator(new SetNonStrokingDeviceCMYKColor());
addOperator(new SetNonStrokingDeviceRGBColor());
addOperator(new SetStrokingDeviceRGBColor());
addOperator(new SetNonStrokingDeviceGrayColor());
addOperator(new SetStrokingDeviceGrayColor());
addOperator(new SetStrokingColor());
addOperator(new SetStrokingColorN());
addOperator(new SetNonStrokingColor());
addOperator(new SetNonStrokingColorN());

Only then getGraphicsState() will return proper information.

See https://pdfbox.apache.org/2.0/migration.html