(S i m p l e) ? P D F M a n i p u l a t i o n L a n g u a g e

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(S i m p l e) ? P D F M a n i p u l a t i o n
L a n g u a g e

• Stefano Pacifico
• Jayesh Kataria
• Dhivya Khrishnan
• Hye Seon Yi

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Contents

• Overview Motivation
• Language Features
• PDF Functionalities
• Architectural Design
• Tutorials (including example)
• Lesson Learned
• Summary

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Overview Motivation

• SPML (Simple PDF Manipulation Language) is a
  language to create and manipulate PDF files.
• PDF is a de-facto standard for electronic
  documents because of its open standard format
  with a free viewer program (Acrobat Reader)
• However, it is difficult and expensive to
  manipulate PDF files!!!
• There are a few open source libraries available
  (ex) iText and XPAAJ ? Why not come up with a
  language for PDF by using them
• Focus is on manipulation of PDF files since
  people can easily create PDF files using
  freewares (ex) PDF ReDirect, cutePDF Writer

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Language Features

• Carefully chosen set of keywords
• Multiple Types (int, string, pdf, void, array)
• Several Operators
• Unary Operators (,!)
• Arithmetic ( , - , , /)
• Comparison (lt , lt , gt , gt , ,!)
• Logical operators (, )
• PDF operators (, create, extractpage,
  totextfile, highlight, in)

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Language Features (con.)

• Various types of statements
• Conditional statements (ifelse)
• Iterative statements (while)
• Jump statements (return, continue, break)
• I/O statements (print, totextfile)
• User defined functions
• Recursion

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PDF Functionalities

• File generation (create)
• File concatenation ( operator)
• Page extraction (extractpage)
• Highlight a word(highlight)
• All Pdfs in directory (in)
• Text file support (totextfile)

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Architectural Design
Front End
Tree Walker
Back End
Runtime Library
SPMLLexer SPMLParser
SPMLWalker CompilerException SPMLCodeGen Environme
nt Classes
CodeGen SPMLLibrary
JRE System iText XPAAJ
Take SPML source code and output AST
With the AST passed, perform static semantic
checking and generate Java output code
Bridge class between Java output code and Runtime
Libraries
iText (Open Source PDF library in Java), XPAAJ
(XML/PDF Access API for Java from Adobe)
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Tutorials - Example

• Program to concatenate two PDF files
• start()
• pdf p1
• p1 "a.pdf" / open a.pdf /
• pdf p2
• p2 "b.pdf" / open b.pdf /
• pdf combined
• combined create "c.pdf" / create c.pdf /
• combined p1 p2

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Tutorials (con.)
Function Example
Variable declaration Array declaration pdf file pdf files10
Conditional statement if (a 1) print a is 1
Iteration statement while (a lt 5) print a a
Jump statement return a continue break
I/O statement print Hello World!
User defined function int sum(int a, int b) return a b)
Recursion Used to reverse a file( coming soon in the demo)
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Tutorials (con.)
Function Example
Length operator int a a length files
In operator all PDFs in a dir phrase search in PDF phrase search in string files pdf in dir int iArray10 iArray the in files0 a 1 in 12345
Extract a page file extractpage files0 1
Highlight a phrase highlight pdfFile COMS
Save as a text file totextfile pdfFile file.txt
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Applications

• Forming a catalogue of pdfs
• Reversing file pages
• Deleting a page from pdf
• Extracting even and odd pages and forming a new
  pdf
• Swapping 2 pages of a file
• Highlighting word in a pdf
• Forming a new pdf of pages containing a
• specific word.

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Lesson Learned

• Choose types carefully absence of boolean.
• User input could have been added.
• Deadlines are never too far away!

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Summary

• SPML is a simple yet powerful language for
  manipulating PDF files.
• SPML works!