How to read .pdf file..?

[kuldeep04]

Hi All

I have one .pdf file and I want to read with this file using PHP. and I know that i need pdf library for do that but i haven't any information about that so, please give me detail info for that library also...!

Thanks in advance.

[ratri]

Hi Kuldeep,
I had researched this a while ago and Adobe did not have any public apis to work with a pdf document. I still doubt if they have exposed any apis.

[kuldeep04]

Hi Ratri,

Thanks for reply. can u tell me any other option for reading the PDF file.actully i want to fetch some data from PDF and right in to my Database so How can i do this?

and Thanks again for Reply....

[ratri]

The way I did it was creating a desktop application with an IE control; load the PDF, programmatically right click on the document and copy. Then parse the copied contents using regular expressions. However, there is room for a lot of mistakes in this approach. Also, the author of the PDF can set the text in the document not selectable. In such scenario, this approach will not work.

One more alternative is to grab a snapshot of the document and parse the bitmap to detect the text in the bitmap. This again is a tedious job .... out of my radar :)

[kuldeep04]

Hi Ratri,

Thanks for the answer but i would like to inform you that i m making the Web application so i couldn't use desktop application so plz reply me that which i can use with web application.

Thanks again...!

[ratri]

Hi Kuldeep,
At this point, there is not much that can be done unless Adobe exposes some some PDF api; which at this point they are not.

[R0bb0b]

I'm reading that the way to go on this is PDFlib-PDI, I cannot give you any examples as I have only worked with pdflib, not pdi.

[nav33n]

Is it really possible ? :S

[R0bb0b]

Looks like there are examples.

[R0bb0b]

http://www.pdflib.com/pdflib-cookbook/pdf-import/starter-pdfmerge/php-starter-pdfmerge/
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.pdf-fit-pdi-page.php

[nav33n]

Hmm.. a little complicated..

[R0bb0b]

Ya, and it looks like the functionality is extremely limited.

[sdjewani]

still no any proper answer i found wd the reasurch of 3 days....
but to write pdf we can use tcpdf which writes pdf from html to pdf and for html we can use ckeditor.