Find links and their positions in a PDF

Question

I need to find all links in a PDF file, along with the page they're on and their X/Y position. Is there any tool or combination of tools I can use to do that?

Answer 1

I haven't heard of a single tool that could tell you the coordinates of some text or link in a pdf file. It is even a bit hard to imagine, how this might be done reliably - I guess the tool would have to either calculate the geometry of all the text in the document (probably a modification of some standard pdf rendering library like poppler would be necessary for that) or otherwise base its estimation on some X-automation tool working on top of a pdf viewer.

What you can do without too much effort is grep for links in a non-encrypted and uncompressed pdf file. Here are some example grep searches you can use:

grep -ao "http://[[:print:]]*" TheFile.pdf

grep -ao "http://[[:alnum:]./]*" TheFile.pdf

grep -ao "http://[^ ']*" TheFile.pdf

grep -ao "URI(http://.*[^\])" TheFile.pdf

The last one should be the closest to what links can be found while reading though the file. Still, you'd probably have to work a bit on those regexes to extract the links you really want from a certain document.

If the document is packed or encrypted, you'd have to extract a plain version from it first. Use pdftk or similar tool to do that.