A: It's not impossible in the first place, it's just Ridiculously Hard.  
"Practially Impossible" vs "Impossible".  It might take a year or two of HIghly 
Talented developer time, but it could be done.  If you've got a couple hundred 
thousand dollars burning a hole in your pocket, we can get started right away.  
;)

B: You have a number of options:
1) The easy way: attach CSV[s] to your PDF[s].
2) The Much Less Easy way:  Logical Structure.

The higher-level objects in iText don't support logical structure themselves 
(though I suppose you could hack on them till they did).  I ended up drawing 
everything "manually" and adding the logical structure at that level.

"Structure" isn't easy.  You have to build a logical structure in parallel to 
the "physical" structure of your document, and provide links between the two.

iText has bare-bones support for creating the structure and links, but it's far 
from friendly at this point.  You'll need to look at:
PdfStructureTreeRoot
PdfStructureElement
PdfContentByte.beginMarkedContentSequence/endMarkedContentSequence

Plus the PDF Specification sections on Marked Content and Logical Structure.

You're probably far better off adding structure support to the existing 
PdfTable* (and probably several other) classes rather than trying to render 
them yourself and add the structure in your custom code.

3) Throw money at iTextSoftware and we'll do #2 for you.  How much money?  
Err... We'd have to see a more concrete description of your requirements, come 
up with an estimate, etc etc.  Much less than the "hundreds of thousands over a 
year or two", that's for certain.  I'd guestimate "thousands over a month", but 
those are Brown Values, produced via Rectal Extraction.  

The good news is that I've done some of this for an internal branch of iText 
for Cardiff, so I have a good idea of what's involved... even submitted the 
code back to the trunk but it was pulled when Various Bugs were discovered in 
unusual (to me) cases.  You might even be able to go through the SVN archives 
and find that code as a starting point to make your own #2.  Heh... yay 
bathroom humor.

--Mark Storer 
  Senior Software Engineer 
  Cardiff.com

#include <disclaimer> 
typedef std::Disclaimer<Cardiff> DisCard; 



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Marchywka [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Saturday, January 16, 2010 4:38 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [iText-questions] Get table from PDF IText
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------
> > Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:04:12 +0100
> > From: [email protected]
> > To: [email protected]
> > Subject: Re: [iText-questions] Get table from PDF IText
> >
> > aro1982 wrote:
> >> Is there any solution to get table (structure, cells 
> content) from existing
> >> PDF? I've created some PDF with PdfPTable and I want to 
> get this table from
> >> file. I've tried it in many ways but it is very difficult 
> to do and I can't
> >> find any examples which can help me.
> >
> > That's because you're trying something that is impossible.
> 
> 
> Are there qualifications or alternative appraoches here? That 
> is, Leonard has sometimes
> offered that it is possible to preserve the logical structure 
> in a document
> so that people who want to use computers to automate data processing
> instead of just look at pictures can, with varying amounts of 
> effort, do so with a pdf file.
> If an ambitious pdf author wanted to allow a user to extract 
> a csv file
> equivalent to his table, without all the formatting junk and 
> just the data,
> how may he go about designing the document ?  Data generally 
> gomes into
> forms either from manual entry ( typing ) or some other source in a
> character format not garbled into pixels using an arbitrary font. It
> would be nice in many cases to preserve this information.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
> 
> > --
> > This answer is provided by 1T3XT BVBA
> > http://www.1t3xt.com/ - http://www.1t3xt.info
> >
> > 
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> You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/
                                          
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Throughout its 18-year history, RSA Conference consistently attracts the
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attendees to learn about information security's most important issues through
interactions with peers, luminaries and emerging and established companies.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsaconf-dev2dev
_______________________________________________
iText-questions mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions

Buy the iText book: http://www.1t3xt.com/docs/book.php
Check the site with examples before you ask questions: 
http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/
You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Throughout its 18-year history, RSA Conference consistently attracts the
world's best and brightest in the field, creating opportunities for Conference
attendees to learn about information security's most important issues through
interactions with peers, luminaries and emerging and established companies.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsaconf-dev2dev
_______________________________________________
iText-questions mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions

Buy the iText book: http://www.1t3xt.com/docs/book.php
Check the site with examples before you ask questions: 
http://www.1t3xt.info/examples/
You can also search the keywords list: http://1t3xt.info/tutorials/keywords/

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