Free tool for watching coordinates in PDF

Question

Is there any tool in some PDF Viewer/Editor like Acrobat, Evince, etc. where I can navigate and watch coordinates(i.e. (x,y)) of any selected point in PDF-document?

Solution 1

I've found that Gimp is perfect for this! It even has different units of measure, so this is my choice

Solution 2

Apache PDFBox PDFDebugger 2.0.* displays PDF coordinates in the status bar. Get it here: https://pdfbox.apache.org/download.cgi

Download the pdfbox-app-2.0.*.jar available under command line tools on above link. Then run the below command with the required file.

  java -jar pdfbox-app-2.0.*.jar PDFDebugger "InputFile" 

You would be able to see the coordinates by hovering the mouse on pdf page. You can select a particular page from left hand side and corresponding page will be displayed on right. Note pdf displays coordinates from lower left of the page so if you want to extract some text using these coordinates you need to subtract the y axis from the total height and then use it. In case of below example you will have to use x:47 y:(792-522)=270

The 3.0.0 version has a few extra features unrelated to this question: https://repository.apache.org/content/groups/snapshots/org/apache/pdfbox/pdfbox-debugger/3.0.0-SNAPSHOT/

Solution 3

To explain @michael Z's answer, I found the following works:

These steps are for paint.net, but most image manipulation programs like The Gimp should be similar:

1. open the pdf up in reader.
2. screenshot it.
3. paste into paint.net
4. choose image > flip vertical.
5. choose view >show rulers.
6. Also tick pixels.
7. Resize image to use inches and be 8.5 x 11 (if it's American letter) and 72 DPI.

Now use the rectangle select tool. The image is upside-down, so the upper-left of the tool is the lower-left for the .pdf and the lower right is the upper-right for the .pdf.

FYI - In Paint.Net, the bottom toolbar always shows the xy coordinates of the cursor.

It makes your eyes a bit squiffy to read documents upside-down for while, but at least you can now get a pretty good estimate of the locations on the document!

I found this description helpful too

Solution 4

Also good old GhostView (gv) shows coordinates.

Solution 5

1. CanOpener is a very impressive tool for working with PDF files. It operates as a plugin for Acrobat Pro - http://www.windjack.com/product/pdfcanopener/

2. Another option would be to use the Foxit Phantom PDF Advanced Editor which allows you to select objects and see the properties of each object.

3. You could use a library such as Quick PDF Library to render the image to a BMP file and then write yourself a little TOOL to scroll and zoom around the BMP file reporting back coordinated. http://www.quickpdflibrary.com - (Note : I do consulting work for Quick PDF)

4. I am sure you could load the PDF into Adobe Illustrator and get the current coordinates in the status bar.

Andrew

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