initializing multipage annotations file

Hi

I'm currently working on annotations on PDF files. I have a performance problem to initialize the annotations file. I noticed that the XML file writes sequencially all the pages, without page numbers.

Problem: I have a PDF 110 pages long, and have only annotations on page 1 and on page 80. I have no choice but writing empty pages for page 2 to 79. Otherwise, even if I specify 'INSERTPAGE' in SaveOptions I receive an error 'PAGE NOT FOUND' when saving page 79.

As a workaround at the beginning if the annotations file does not exist I insert the first page container 110 times. It works but it takes some time (about 20 seconds). Is there is a 'Leadtools' solution for that (maybe I misunderstood the method for multipage docs) ?


Thanks in advance!

Hello,

The workaround you created is correct, because there is no special function in LEADTOOLS to number the pages or insert 'blank' pages.

If your application faces this issue all the time, and you would like to optimize it, you could create templates of common blank-page files, such as 50, 100, 150, etc. pages, then instead of looping every time to create a new file, copy the nearest template and only loop to append the needed number of pages. For example if you need 110 pages, copy the 100-page template then loop 10 times to append 10 new pages.

Thanks,
Maen Badwan
LEADTOOLS Technical Support

Thanks, I followed your idea about the template. I have a template with no page, and a marker. I have another template with a 'page' tag, with a container. In my application I take the empty template and add 110 times the page object.

At the beginning it didn't work. Then I noticed 3 invisible characters at the beginning of your file ( $EF, $BB, $BF ). Now I've added these values in the template; it's ok and the process lasts less than  2 secs for 110 pages.

I verified these values do not vary upon the number of pages. But is there any reason why I shouldn't build the initial XML file this way?

Hello,

The only thing to watch out for is that our annotations format is not publicly documented, so you should not generally modify the structure of annotations files too much, and instead should normally use LEADTOOLS functions to manipulate these files.
However, in your case, since the files you created are accepted by the toolkit, and similar to the files saved by it, there should be no problem using them.

Thanks,
Maen Badwan
LEADTOOLS Technical Support