Frequently Asked Questions

This message means that you need to configure the log4j logging system. See the log4j documentation for more information.

PDFBox comes with a sample log4j configuration file. To use it you set a system property like this

If this is not working for you then you may have to specify the log4j config file using a URL path, like this:

log4j.configuration=file:///

Is PDFBox thread safe?

No! Only one thread may access a single document at a time. You can have multiple threads each accessing their own PDDocument object.

Why do I get a "Warning: You did not close the PDF Document"?

You need to call close() on the PDDocument inside the finally block, if you don't then the document will not be closed properly. Also, you must close all PDDocument objects that get created. The following code creates two PDDocument objects; one from the "new PDDocument()" and the second by the load method.

PDDocument doc = new PDDocument();
try
 
doc = PDDocument.load( "my.pdf" );
>
finally
 
if( doc != null ) 
 
doc.close(); 
>
>

Why do I not get all fields when iterating?

Call getFieldTree() instead of getFields() . The later one only returns root-level fields.

Font Handling

I'm getting java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: . is not available in this font's encoding: WinAnsiEncoding

Check whether the character is available in WinAnsiEncoding by looking at the PDF Specification Appendix D. If not, but if it is available in this font (in windows, have a look with charmap.exe), then load the font with PDType0Font.load(), see also in the EmbeddedFonts.java example in the source code download.

What fonts do I need on my system?

Windows or Mac usually have the minimum fonts needed. You do need fonts that aren't embedded in PDFs if these fonts are outside of the "Standard 14 fonts" set, and any specific fonts that you want when you are creating PDFs.

For rendering and text extraction, you'll need the "Standard 14 fonts" mentioned in the PDF specification: Times-Roman, Helvetica, Courier, Symbol, Times-Bold, Helvetica-Bold, Courier-Bold, Symbol, ZapfDingbats, Times-Italic, Helvetica-Oblique, Courier-Oblique, Times-BoldItalic, Helvetica-BoldOblique, Courier-BoldOblique. You can get most of these fonts on linux by running sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer . Arial is as good as Helvetica. MS-Gothic can be used instead of ZapfDingbats. See also this stackoverflow answer about getting ZapfDingbats from ghostscript fonts. The Times/Courier/Helvetica fonts can also be replaced with the appropriate Liberation or Nimbus fonts. The exact substitution logic that PDFBox uses can be read in the file FontMapperImpl.java from the source code download.

To create PDFs with "Standard 14 fonts" only, no extra fonts files are needed (version 2.0.5 or higher), as these are not embedded and PDFBox has all the metrics and no longer needs to access the actual fonts.

Why do external fonts seem corrupt when loaded as a resource?

If your program runs properly when the font is loaded from a file but not when loaded from the resources, check whether resource filtering is activated in the maven-resources-plugin in your maven build script, and disable it for font files. See this stackoverflow answer on how to fix this.

PDF Creation

Can I use PDFBox to create complex layouts?

I'd like to use PDFBox to create a complex layout containing several paragraphs, tables, images etc. Is PDFBox fit for that purpose?

PDFBox being a low level PDF library provides the APIs to create page content such as text, images etc. But at this point in time it doesn't provide a higher level API to do page layout, paragraph handling, automatic line wrapping or create tables and such.

But PDFBox is the foundation of some projects which might help in that case. This includes projects such as

You may also want to consider using Apache FOP which allows to create complex documents from XML data and templates-

I'm creating a PDF but my page is empty. Why?

Make sure that you closed your content stream before saving.

Text Extraction

Why does the extracted text appear in the wrong sequence?

By default, text extraction is done in the same sequence as the text in the PDF page content stream. PDF is a graphic format, not a text format, and unlike HTML, it has no requirements that text one on page be rendered in a certain order. The order is the one that was determined by the software that created the PDF. To get text sorted from left to right and top to botton, use setSortByPosition(true) .

How come I am not getting any text from the PDF document?

Text extraction from a pdf document is a complicated task and there are many factors involved that effect the possibility and accuracy of text extraction. It would be helpful to the PDFBox team if you could try a couple things.

• Open the PDF in Acrobat and try to extract text from there. If Acrobat can extract text then PDFBox should be able to as well and it is a bug if it cannot. If Acrobat cannot extract text then PDFBox 'probably' cannot either.
• It might really be an image instead of text. Some PDF documents are just images that have been scanned in. You can tell by using the selection tool in Acrobat, if you can't select any text then it is probably an image.

How come I am getting gibberish(G38G43G36G51G5) when extracting text?

This is because the characters in a PDF document can use a custom encoding instead of unicode or ASCII. When you see gibberish text then it probably means that a meaningless internal encoding is being used. The only way to access the text is to use OCR. This may be a future enhancement.

What does "java.io.IOException: Can't handle font width" mean?

This probably means that the "Resources" directory is not in your classpath. The Resources directory is included in the PDFBox jar so this is only a problem if you are building PDFBox yourself and not using the binary.

Why do I get "You do not have permission to extract text" on some documents?

PDF documents have certain security permissions that can be applied to them and two passwords associated with them, an user password and an owner password. If the "cannot extract text" permission bit is set then you need to decrypt the document with the owner password in order to extract the text.

Can't we just extract the text without parsing the whole document or extract text as it is parsed?

Not really, for a couple reasons.

• If the document is encrypted then you need to parse at least until the encryption dictionary before you can decrypt.
• Sometimes the PDFont contains vital information needed for text extraction.
• Text on a page does not have to be drawn in reading order. For example: if the page said "Hello World", the pdf could have been written such that "World" gets drawn and then the cursor moves to the left and the word "Hello" is drawn.

PDF rendering

I'm getting an OutOfMemoryError. What can I do?

The memory footprint depends on the PDF itself and on the resolution you use for rendering. Some possible options:

• increase the -Xmx value when starting java
• use a scratch file by loading files with this code PDDocument.load(file, MemoryUsageSetting.setupTempFileOnly())
• activate subsampling by calling setSubsamplingAllowed(true) on your PDFRenderer object
• be careful not to hold your images after rendering them, e.g. avoid putting all images of a PDF into a List
• don't forgot to close your PDDocument objects
• decrease the scale when calling PDFRenderer.renderImage() , or the dpi value when calling PDFRenderer.renderImageWithDPI()
• disable the cache for PDImageXObject objects by calling PDDocument.setResourceCache() with a cache object that is derived from DefaultResourceCache and whose call public void put(COSObject indirect, PDXObject xobject) does nothing. Be aware that this will slow down rendering for PDF files that have an identical image in several pages (e.g. a company logo or a background). More about this can be read in PDFBOX-3700.

Why are some texts in poor quality and not antialiased?

This is because in some PDFs (e.g. the one in PDFBOX-2814), text is not rendered directly, but as a shaped clipping from a background. Java graphics does not support "soft clipping" https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-4212743, and because of that, the edges are not looking smooth. Soft clipping could be achieved with some extra steps, but these would cost additional time and memory space. You can have a higher quality by rendering at a higher dpi and then downscale the image.

What to do with the IllegalArgumentException "Numbers of source Raster bands and source color space components do not match"?

Sadly, this is a known bug in Java Imaging. Use the twelvemonkeys library as described in the dependencies page.

Why do black inkblots, black stains, black clouds or black spots appear when rendering?

This is a bug in the original java JPEG2000 decoder. You can see examples of such images in PDFBOX-1752 and related issues. Use the newer (1.4.0 or higher) jai-imageio-jpeg2000 and jai-imageio-core decoders as explained in the dependencies page.

Why is printing so slow for some PDFs?

If display rendering happens within a decent time but not printing, then the cause is likely transparent elements. Java renders these much slower when printing, see here for an explanation, and PDFBOX-3046 and related issues for sample files.

A workaround is to use a specific dpi for the constructors of PDFPageable and PDFPrintable , PDFBox will then render into an image and print that one. You should experiment with 300, 600 and 1200 dpi by trying it with the command-line app.

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