Reading PDF Files with PHP

[dunnm@inhs.org]

This is probably a more appropriate location to post this question. I
should have know that since I've found most of the other PHP/PDF
information contained in this group.

Here's my issue...I will from time to time receive 4 - 5 PDF files into
a directory; I want to be able to schedule a task which will pick up
these 4 - 5 PDFs, read through them and then generate 1 pdf. Creating
PDFs in PHP is obviously fairly easy, however I haven't found anything
yet that will actually read the PDFs so that I can then place that
content into this new single file. Can this be done with PHP. Any
suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

[yaheew]

Re: Reading PDF Files with PHP

http://www.plsgoogleit.com/

<dunnm@inhs.org > wrote in message
news:1103593644 .453446.91580@z 14g2000cwz.goog legroups.com...[color=blue]
> This is probably a more appropriate location to post this question. I
> should have know that since I've found most of the other PHP/PDF
> information contained in this group.
>
> Here's my issue...I will from time to time receive 4 - 5 PDF files into
> a directory; I want to be able to schedule a task which will pick up
> these 4 - 5 PDFs, read through them and then generate 1 pdf. Creating
> PDFs in PHP is obviously fairly easy, however I haven't found anything
> yet that will actually read the PDFs so that I can then place that
> content into this new single file. Can this be done with PHP. Any
> suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you in advance.
>[/color]

[Chung Leong]

Re: Reading PDF Files with PHP

<dunnm@inhs.org > wrote in message
news:1103593644 .453446.91580@z 14g2000cwz.goog legroups.com...[color=blue]
> This is probably a more appropriate location to post this question. I
> should have know that since I've found most of the other PHP/PDF
> information contained in this group.
>
> Here's my issue...I will from time to time receive 4 - 5 PDF files into
> a directory; I want to be able to schedule a task which will pick up
> these 4 - 5 PDFs, read through them and then generate 1 pdf. Creating
> PDFs in PHP is obviously fairly easy, however I haven't found anything
> yet that will actually read the PDFs so that I can then place that
> content into this new single file. Can this be done with PHP. Any
> suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you in advance.
>[/color]

Reading from PDF files is almost impossible. You can extract bits and piece
from one and make small changes here and there. There's no way for a
computer to read the document in its entirety because the logical structure
of the text isn't there. What a PDF file contains is essentially
instructions to the printer--that is, the visual representation of the
document. A paragraph in a PDF, for instance, is just a series of moveTo(72,
72), printLine(text) , moveto(72, 144), printLine(text) commands. To get back
the original paragraph of text you would need OCR-like artificial
intelligence.

What IS possible is stitching a number of PDF files into one. It would just
be a matter of reading in the PDF objects (without actually decoding the
content sterams), writing them to a new file, then update appropriate
reference tables. If you have the inclination, go the Adobe's web site and
download the reference manual.