About

pdf2msgpack is designed to efficiently dump information from a PDF in a portable format which is easy to consume without heavyweight PDF libraries.

At the moment it dumps glyphs (a rectangle and text) and path information.

`pdf2msgpack` is Alpha Software

pdf2msgpack is used internally at The Sensible Code company. It's still quite young and the output might change significantly.

Installation

To configure and build, run:

./waf configure
./waf build

There is an accompanying docker file which enables building a static binary.

To build the static binary, just ensure submodules are checked out and invoke make.

git submodule update --init
make

Running

./pdf2msgpack <pdf-file>

Output

pdf2msgpack writes its output to msgpack, which is a convenient, fast serialization format with libraries available in many languages.

Here is a description of the wire format.

At the top level the document is not a list but consecutive objects written to the stream.

document (consecutive objects): <wire version : int> <metadata> <page>...

metadata (dict): {
  "Pages": int,
  "FileName": str,
  "XFA": dict,
  "EmbeddedFiles": [<embedfile>...],
  "FontInfo": [<fontinfo : dict>...],
  (other string fields supplied in PDF),
}

page (dict): {
  "Size": [<width : int>, <height : int>],
  "Glyphs": [<glyph>...],
  "Paths": [<pathitem>...],
  "Bitmap": [ [<width : int>, <height : int>], <pixeldata : uint8> ]
}

embedfile (list):
  [ <name : str>, <description : str>, <mime-type : str>,
    <created-date : str>, <modified-date : str>, <content : bin>]

pathitem (list): [<type : (EO_FILL|STROKE|FILL|SET_STROKE_COLOR|
                           SET_STROKE_WIDTH|SET_FILL_COLOR)>,
                  [<pathdata>...]]

pathdata (list): depending on pathitem type
  EO_FILL, FILL, STROKE: pathcoord
  SET_FILL_COLOR: [<r : uint8>, <g : uint8>, <b : uint8>]
  SET_STROKE_WIDTH: <width : float>

pathcoord (2 list or 6 list):
  point: [<x : float>, <y : float>]
  quadratic curve: [<a : float>, <b : float>, <c : float>, <d : float>, <e : float>, <f : float>]

fontinfo (dict): {<Name> <Type> <Encoding> <Embedded> <Subset> <ToUnicode>}

Options

Some of the options affect the wire format generated by the command.

--meta-only: changes document to skip generation of page objects.
--bitmap: generate grayscale bitmap in page object (otherwise absent)
--xfa: generate XML Forms Architecture (XFA) data in metadata object (otherwise nil)
--embedded-files: generate embedded files in metadata object (otherwise nil)

Licence

pdf2msgpack is licensed under the GPLv2.

sensiblecodeio/pdf2msgpack