page dimensions

[jsfenfen]

Is there a way to return overall page dimensions? Or alternatively, relative positions (i.e. in fractional terms--so like 0.56 of the page)?

Use case is comparing / finding words at comparable positions in documents that have different sizes due to different prior processing. (This is also required for accurately displaying word positions as overlays on a pdf). One could get at this by using relative positions (and I guess doctop would be prior_pages + current relative position). If you just captured relative position you'd probably also want to add an orientation variable--though I guess that would be determinable based on letter box proportions.

Having page_width and page_height in every line in the csv seems awkward--but would work. In json output one could just add it as a variable outside the rest of the data. Maybe that's the cleanest approach. Do you have any thoughts?

[jsvine]

Is there a way to return overall page dimensions?

In the library, you should be able to do mypdf.pages[0].width/mypdf.pages[0].height. When I update the docs for the forthcoming v0.3.0, I'll document that.

In the command-line tool, there's currently no way to output page dimensions. However, adding a subcommand to do that wouldn't be terribly difficult. I'll hope to get this in v0.3.0.

Having page_width and page_height in every line in the csv seems awkward--but would work. In json output one could just add it as a variable outside the rest of the data. Maybe that's the cleanest approach. Do you have any thoughts?

Yeah, I think it might be worth adding some more structure to the JSON output, so that it looks something like:

{
  "metadata": { ... },
  "pages": [
    { 
       "width": 800,
       "height": 600,
       "objects": { "chars": [], "rects": [], ... }
    }
    ...
  ]
}

Thoughts on that?

In CSV output, maybe there's just a separate command, e.g., pdfplumber pageinfo, to provide id/width/height?

[jsvine]

Done! Richer JSON representation now in v0.3.0. #4

[jsfenfen]

That's awesome. Thanks again!