Transparent background for whole pdf

Thanks – that’s intuitively clear to me and judging by your email address I’m guessing you know of what you speak. So probably I am asking the wrong question.

Basically, I am using PDFTron’s PDF2Image to “convert” the pdf doc to an image (my app needs the pdf for the print-ready, final document, but I need a jpg for a quick web/email preview). Now, I’ve got a need to convert not to a jpg but to a png – Pdf2Image will do that, and according to PDFTron’s documentation it is possible to preserve the transparency. They explain what to do if you are using their pdf library, but I’m not, I’m already vested in using iText.  So, something they are doing in their library makes the pdf carry some information that will then tell the image converter to maintain transparency, but I don’t know what that is, was hoping that was something basic to pdf. I will contact them (PDFTron) as well, and see if they can help.

Thanks again,

Ian

Any area of a PDF that does not have content on it is “transparent” - there is no “background color”.

And since iText doesn’t actually render anything, I am not sure where the issue is.

Leonard


On 7/1/09 1:41 PM, "Ian Rashkin" <irashkin@...> wrote:

Maybe this is something obvious that I am overlooking, or maybe not possible – is there a way to set the pdf file’s background to be transparent? IT is white be default, as far as I can tell. I use a component by PDFTron to render the pdf out to an image, and I want to be able to render to a PNG with transparency.
Apparently their PDFNet SDK has such an option, which makes me think it must be possible, but I am using iText (well, iTextSharp) and not sure how to do this. Any advice?
 
Thanks,
Ian

--
Leonard Rosenthol
PDF Standards Architect
Adobe Systems Incorporated

In case anyone needs the same info: I found the answer from PDFTron, and had nothing to do with iText – just a setting in the pdf-to-image conversion command (“--transparent_page”, for those in similar need).

Thanks to all who helped.

-Ian

Maybe this is something obvious that I am overlooking, or maybe not possible – is there a way to set the pdf file’s background to be transparent? IT is white be default, as far as I can tell. I use a component by PDFTron to render the pdf out to an image, and I want to be able to render to a PNG with transparency.

Apparently their PDFNet SDK has such an option, which makes me think it must be possible, but I am using iText (well, iTextSharp) and not sure how to do this. Any advice?

Thanks,

Ian