PdfCodeEditor

08 Jul 2016

Introduction

Hello, my name is Dmitry Goryachev and I’m a software engineer from Atalasoft. Let me introduce the tool, which I created to explore and edit PDF-files – PdfCodeEditor.

PdfCodeEditor is the open-source simple text editor based on AvalonEdit and AvalonDock controls.

Scenario

When I began working with PDF as a developer, I found some tools for viewing internals of PDF (PDFXplorer, “Browse Internal PDF Structure” in Acrobat Reader Pro DC and etc.). However, these tools do not work with damaged PDF-files. First time I worked with Notepad++ with HEX-plugin, but switching to HEX for viewing character offset and back is very annoying. Also after point-fixes, in some specific cases, I got broken PDF-streams due to the saving.

For these purposes, I created PdfCodeEditor. Now it allows open damaged PDF-files, edit them and save without issues.

Features

• Syntax highlighting and hiding streams in regions
• Viewing actual offset of the characters
• Go to definition on Ctrl + left mouse/F12
• Navigation to the next or previous offset
• Navigation to the specified offset
• Standard Search panel from AvalonEdit
• Saving does not damage the PDF-streams

Plans

• Support Chocolatey
• Object-tree to simplify navigation
• Viewing decoded streams
• Viewing streams as HEX, Image, Text, etc.
• Auto-updating xreftables after edit

If you are interested in contributing, join to PdfCodeEditor on GitHub. Thank you for attention, see you later!