pdfsyntax

Is the UI tooling that does the visualization a library? I really like the UI format, would love to use this for breaking down and debugging video byte streams too. EDIT: Oh it's actually reasonably simple, great use of CSS! https://github.com/desgeeko/pdfsyntax/blob/main/docs/simple_...

Hi, I've just finished a rebuild of this function and added a lot of new features: info, page index, minimap, inverted index,... I think it may be useful for inspection, debugging or just as a learning resource showcasing the PDF file format. This is a pet project and I would be happy to receive some feedback! Regards

My tool (PDFSyntax[1], mentioned in this thread) is a Python library that is able to both inspect and transform PDF files. Depending on your transformation use case, you may write an incremental update with only a few bytes at the end of the original file instead of rewriting it entirely. To my knowledge this feature of the PDF specification is often overlooked and not a lot of libraries implements it. It is a work in progress and I have not developed functions for images yet, though. [1] https://github.com/desgeeko/pdfsyntax

I am the author of PDFSyntax, thanks for mentioning it! The HTML output is like a pretty print where you can read view objects and follow links to other objects. Since I have added a new command (disasm) that is CLI oriented and displays a greppable summary of the structure. Here is an explanation: https://github.com/desgeeko/pdfsyntax/blob/main/docs/disasse...

This is cool! Here are some other similar(?) tools, for seeing the inner contents of a PDF file (the raw objects etc), but I haven't compared them to this tool here: - https://pdf.hyzyla.dev/ - https://github.com/itext/i7j-rups (java -jar ~/Downloads/itext-rups-7.2.5.jar) - https://github.com/desgeeko/pdfsyntax (python3 -m pdfsyntax inspect foo.pdf > output.html) - https://github.com/trailofbits/polyfile (polyfile --html output.html foo.pdf) - https://www.reportmill.com/snaptea/PDFViewer/ = https://www.reportmill.com/snaptea/PDFViewer/pviewer.html (drag PDF onto it) - https://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfinspector/ (an "example" of https://superficial.sourceforge.net/) - https://www.o2sol.com/pdfxplorer/overview.htm More?

For editing, I was able to make some simple edits (not of individual objects, but things like removing or duplicating pages, or editing crop boxes) using pdf-lib instead of pdf.js: see for example (just right-click and "view source") https://shreevatsa.net/pdf-pages/ and https://shreevatsa.net/pdf-unspread/ For seeing the raw source, after using such things for a bit (e.g. the output HTML file generated by https://github.com/desgeeko/pdfsyntax which is very good), I'm starting to feel it's nice to look at the first few times / in some cases, but in the long run / for large PDFs, maybe it's not really so useful or worth it.

I never knew about the J number suffix in python: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#im... which it would appear is used to represent references: https://github.com/desgeeko/pdfsyntax/blob/main/tests/test_p... I wish you good luck, this file format has tripped up many, many a developer. It blew up on a pdf I had lying around: ValueError: could not convert string to float: b'5.0.0' 104 0 obj << /Producer (pdfTeX-1.40.10) /Creator (TeX) /CreationDate (D:20131209161146-08'00') /ModDate (D:20131209161146-08'00') /Trapped /False /PTEX.Fullbanner (This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10-2.2 (TeX Live 2009/Debian) kpathsea version 5.0.0) >> endobj as it seems a string with nested parens jams up the parser

Hi HN! This is my pet project, written from scratch because there is so much to discover and learn in the process. The focus is on simplicity and incremental updates. Progress is slow because I do not have much spare time to work on this, but I would love to hear some feedback. Regards