Reading a particular page from a PDF document using PDFBox

Question

How do I read a particular page (given a page number) from a PDF document using PDFBox?

Congratulation

Can you be more specific about what you mean by "read"? – Biggers

@Adrian: Say, I want the page #2 in PDPage object. – Congratulation

Answer 1

This should work:

PDPage firstPage = (PDPage)doc.getAllPages().get( 0 );

as seen in the BookMark section of the tutorial

Update 2015, Version 2.0.0 SNAPSHOT

Seems this was removed and put back (?). getPage is in the 2.0.0 javadoc. To use it:

PDDocument document = PDDocument.load(new File(filename));
PDPage doc = document.getPage(0);

The getAllPages method has been renamed getPages

PDPage page = (PDPage)doc.getPages().get( 0 );

Bootle

What is the type of doc here? The PDDocument class doesn't seem to have a getAllPages method. – Congratulation

@Congratulation doc is a PDDocumentCatalog object – Spagyric

For those coming along here later: pdfbox.apache.org/cookbook/textextraction.html Basically -- use PDFTextStripper, not PDPage as PDPage seems to be more about displaying a page on screen than getting text #13563982 – Deme

For pdfbox 2.0 I simply used: pdDoc.getPage(pageNumber); where pdDoc is a type of PDDocument. – Fugacious

For PDFBox 1.8.10 there seems to be no method getAllPages() for the PDDocument type. The link does not work any more unfortunately. – Arabel

Answer 2

//Using PDFBox library available from http://pdfbox.apache.org/  
//Writes pdf document of specific pages as a new pdf file

//Reads in pdf document  
PDDocument pdDoc = PDDocument.load(file);

//Creates a new pdf document  
PDDocument document = null;

//Adds specific page "i" where "i" is the page number and then saves the new pdf document   
try {   
    document = new PDDocument();   
    document.addPage((PDPage) pdDoc.getDocumentCatalog().getAllPages().get(i));   
    document.save("file path"+"new document title"+".pdf");  
    document.close();  
}catch(Exception e){}

Kinescope

Answer 3

Thought I would add my answer here as I found the above answers useful but not exactly what I needed.

In my scenario I wanted to scan each page individually, look for a keyword, if that keyword appeared, then do something with that page (ie copy or ignore it).

I've tried to simply and replace common variables etc in my answer:

public void extractImages() throws Exception {
        try {
            String destinationDir = "OUTPUT DIR GOES HERE";
            // Load the pdf
            String inputPdf = "INPUT PDF DIR GOES HERE";
            document = PDDocument.load( inputPdf);
            List<PDPage> list = document.getDocumentCatalog().getAllPages();
            // Declare output fileName
            String fileName = "output.pdf";
            // Create output file
            PDDocument newDocument = new PDDocument();
            // Create PDFTextStripper - used for searching the page string
            PDFTextStripper textStripper=new PDFTextStripper(); 
            // Declare "pages" and "found" variable
            String pages= null; 
            boolean found = false;     
            // Loop through each page and search for "SEARCH STRING". If this doesn't exist
            // ie is the image page, then copy into the new output.pdf. 
            for(int i = 0; i < list.size(); i++) {
                // Set textStripper to search one page at a time 
                textStripper.setStartPage(i); 
                textStripper.setEndPage(i);             
                PDPage returnPage = null;
                // Fetch page text and insert into "pages" string
                pages = textStripper.getText(document); 
                found = pages.contains("SEARCH STRING");
                    if (i != 0) {
                            // if nothing is found, then copy the page across to new                     output pdf file
                        if (found == false) {
                            returnPage = list.get(i - 1); 
                            System.out.println("page returned is: " + returnPage);
                            System.out.println("Copy page");
                            newDocument.importPage(returnPage);
                        }
                    }
            }    
            newDocument.save(destinationDir + fileName);

            System.out.println(fileName + " saved");
         } 
         catch (Exception e) {
             e.printStackTrace();
             System.out.println("catch extract image");
         }
    }

Keir

Personal preference, but I find "if (! found)" to be much more readable than the "if (found == false)" syntax :) – Dagostino

Answer 4

Here is the solution. Hope it will solve your issue.

string fileName="C:\mypdf.pdf";
PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(fileName);                   
PDFTextStripper stripper = new PDFTextStripper();
stripper.setStartPage(1);
stripper.setEndPage(2);
//above page number 1 to 2 will be parsed. for parsing only one page set both value same (ex:setStartPage(1);  setEndPage(1);)
string reslut = stripper.getText(doc);

doc.close();

Saracen

Answer 5

you can you getPage method over PDDocument instance

PDDocument pdDocument=null;
pdDocument = PDDocument.load(inputStream);
PDPage pdPage = pdDocument.getPage(0);

Thermopylae

Answer 6

Add this to the command-line call:

ExtractText -startPage 1 -endPage 1 filename.pdf

Change 1 to the page number that you need.

Staton

I have to do it thru a program. – Congratulation