How can I extract annotation appearance data from an existing pdf?

[Aleks Clark]

opening a pdf as PDFDoc, and then extracting/saving FDF and XFDF produces very truncated fields, with no appearance data (i.e. the stamp icons, etc are missing).

This is for use with the Webviewer, so even if we can't actually have them as annotations, we'd like to be able to traverse and extract the data so that it can be re-merged later, and perhaps displayed elsewhere.

Thanks,

Aleks

[Ryan]

Hi Aleks,

The XFDF spec doesn't officially provide support for custom appearance data. However, since it is XML, it is possible to add base64 data. So it is certainly possible to convert annotations with appearance streams into an image, base64 it, and add the base64 data and any required positioning data into the XFDF.

[Support]

FYI: This feature option (in support of WebViewer) will be available soon :)