pdfAnalyser

A PDF Analyser written in Python. It enables you to make basic xref integrity checks, view objects, replace objects and output the complete object-graph or just components to .dot files

usage: pdfAnalyser [-h] {check, show, replace, graph} ... pdffile

Note: This tool only supports documents with xref-tables and without object streams, i.e. "uncompressed" documents. You can produce such documents e.g. with mutools with mutools clean -d [pdffile]

Getting started

To get an overview of the document you can start having a look at the xref-table by typing

$ pdfa showxref pdffile.pdf

Showing and Replacing

You can view any object of this xref that has an n in it's entry (meaning it is used) by typing it's number like this:

$ pdfa show 8 pdffile.pdf

If you then see this object is a stream you can just show this stream by adding --stream, which is useful to export the stream, e.g.:

$ pdfa show 8 --stream pdffile.pdf > 8.stream

This stream is automatically uncompressed if it was encoded with FlateDecode.

A common usecase would be to edit 8.stream now and replace the original content with your new file by

$ pdfa replace 8 8.stream pdffile_8replaced.pdf --stream pdffile.pdf

Using the Graph

Another good way to get an overview is to export the object-graph of the document as a .dot file (and viewing it in a good viewer, have a look at wikipedias .dot article).

Export the graph by typing

$ pdfa graph pdffile.pdf > pdffile_graph.dot

Options

• check check the xref table for duplicates (entries and references streams)
• showxref display the xref-table
• show display an object or the content of a stream

objectnumber  The object number to show
-s, --stream  Show the (if possible) decompressed stream

• replace replace an object or stream

objectnumber  The number of the object to replace
input         The file to load the data to replace the object with
output        Where to write the pdf with the replaced object
--stream      replace just the stream, not the whole object (if possible)

• graph display the object graph in the dot-format

-f FROMOBJECT, --fromObject FROMOBJECT
                      Only consider objects reachable from here
-t TOOBJECT, --toObject TOOBJECT
                      Only consider objects that lead to here

• [-h] help with the commands