Read Method    

Reads an existing PDF.

 

    

Syntax		  

Doc.Read PathOrData [, Password]

 

    

Params		  
Name Type Description
PathOrData String or Array of Bytes The source file path or the source data.
Password String Any password needed to open the document.

 

    

Notes		  

Use this method to read a PDF into a document object. Any existing document content will be discarded.

You can specify the PDF as a file path or by passing in the raw PDF data. Raw data must be held as an array of bytes. You can open encrypted PDF documents if you supply a valid password.

After the read operation is complete, the Page property will contain the ID of the first page in the document. The Rect and MediaBox properties will reflect the size of the first page in the document.

ABCpdf operates an intelligent just-in-time object loading scheme, which ensures that only those objects that are required are loaded into memory. This means that if you are modifying large documents, then server load will be kept to a minimum. The original PDF document must be available for as long as the Document object is being used.

As a result, you cannot overwrite a PDF file while it is open for reading. You will need to save your PDF to another location and then swap the two files round.

Object deletion requires that all references to an object be removed. There is no way of doing this without checking each object in the document. So object deletion requires that every object in the document is loaded, and for large documents, this may place a significant load on the server.

Reading encrypted documents places a greater load on the server because - like object deletion - it requires that every object in the document be loaded.

Please note that you are legally bound to respect the permissions present in existing PDF documents. For details, please see the Legal Requirement Section.

The Read method may be used to read eForm FDF documents as well as PDF documents. Most PDF operations will not work on FDF documents, but you can query field values using the GetInfo methods to return Unicode strings.

Modifying Documents. ABCpdf will allow you to open, modify and save PDF documents.

ABCpdf will allow you to draw on top of PDF documents or add or delete pages or modify document data. However, because of the way that PDF documents are structured, it's unlikely that you'll be able to edit existing content.

So if there are blank spaces which you can draw your entries into, that will work. Indeed, you might want to draw a white box over existing content and then draw on that.

However, you shouldn't expect to be able to edit and re-flow text that is already in your PDF.

 

    

Example		  

The following illustrates how one might add a large red number to every page of a PDF document.

Set theDoc = Server.CreateObject("ABCpdf11.Doc")
theDoc.Read "c:\mypics\sample.pdf"
theDoc.FontSize = 500
theDoc.Color = "255 0 0"
theDoc.HPos = 0.5
theDoc.VPos = 0.3
theCount = theDoc.PageCount
For i = 1 To theCount
  theDoc.PageNumber = i
  theDoc.AddText i
Next
theDoc.Save "c:\mypdfs\docread.pdf"


docsave.pdf [Page 1]
docsave.pdf [Page 2]

docsave.pdf [Page 3]
docsave.pdf [Page 4]