Is there a reliable way to determine if a PDF was generated from a Powerpoint file?

Question

Like the title says. Reason I ask is that we're converting PDFs to formatted ASCII text (using pdftotext) and only want to display the ones that look reasonably sane.

PPT files tend to have text over images, diagonal text and others things that don't translate to ASCII very well, so we'd like to filter them out if we can.

Answer 1

The creating application of a PDF is listed in its XMP metadata. You can see this quite easily in Acrobat 9 (and I believe earlier): go to File > Properties, click Additional Metadata..., then go to Advanced and it's listed under both XMP Core Properties and PDF Properties:

xmp:CreatorTool: Microsoft PowerPoint
pdf:Creator: Microsoft PowerPoint

I'm guessing you want to find this programatically, so you'll need to find a library to read this metadata that works with your language. Here is a list of some XMP tools.

Answer 2

Short answer:

No, I don't think so.

Long answer:

No, I don't think so, because there are may ways to convert a PowerPoint file to pdf, for example Adobe Acrobat and PDFCreator and many many others. It's up to the converters to embed specific information in the PDF file, even if you find a way to detect PowerPoint-source pdf from one convert, the same method may not work for another.

Even longer answer:

No, I don't think so, because of the reasons described in the "long answer". And I don't think detecting the source of the PDF is the best approach to the problem you are trying to solve. Not just PowerPoint produces overlapped text and images. I think it's much better to detect the actual layout of the PDF file. If there are overlay of image and text, then you do some filtering or pre-processing to cater for that.

Answer 3

Your reasoning is very arbitrary - there are surely plenty of PPT files without the features you describe, and plenty of PDF files with them, that were generated from another source.

In theory a better method would just be to detect when these "unwanted" situations occur. However, even though the PDF format is partly open (only for reading, apparently, so it's not truly an open format), extracting complex data like that would be incredibly difficult.

Answer 4

All PDFs can have this problem regardless of their source. Most desktop publishing suites are capable of outputting PDF and are often sold boasting their high quality and flashier PDF presentations ...

A "saner" method would be to use a PDF parser, ITextSharp, or pdfNet...etc, Using the library of your choice, find all image rectangles, and all text rectangles, SORT THE RECTANGLES, and then see if there is substantial overlap of text and image rects -- ignoring image to image overlaps. If so, reject the page and/or document.

That won't be perfect, but at least it's going to catch many PDFs that aren't sane, regardless of source. Other heuristics to add would include color analysis. (i.e. are the colors in the overlapping region sufficiently different to allow "sane" results?)

Best of luck to you

Answer 5

It might put its name in the creator or producer info, but I don't have a copy to check this theory with.

Answer 6

In general, it is not an easy task to programmatically determine (reliably) where a file came from or how it was generated based on its contents. After all, a file is just a collection of bits.

Unless you have a lot of resources to expend building the heuristics to determine whether a file looks "reasonably sane" according to your needs, I would consider this a task for human beings.

Answer 7

some converter from ppt to pdf preserve creator in comments at begin of pdf.

Answer 8

I think that PDF's generated from most applications seem to be the same. It may have some meta-data that you can read from the file...