PDFlib Text Extraction Toolkit (TET) Manual

handles must be valid for the corresponding type of object, etc. Some examples for simple
values (the first line shows a password string containing a blank character):
TET_open_document( ): password {secret string}
TET_open_document( ): lineseparator={ CRLF }
List values. List values consist of multiple values, which may be simple values or list
values in turn. Lists are bracketed with { and }. Example:
TET_set_option( ):
searchpath={/usr/lib/tet d:\tet}
Note The backslash \ character requires special handling in many programming languages
Rectangles. A rectangle is a list of four float values specifying the coordinates of the
lower left and upper right corners of a rectangle. Rectangle coordinates will be interpreted
in the standard or user coordinate system (see Section 6.3, »Page and Text Geometry«,
page 64). Example:
TET_open_page( ): includebox = {{0 0 500 100} {0 500 500 600}}
Character references in option lists. Some environments require the programmer to
write source code in 8-bit encodings. This makes it cumbersome to include isolated Unicode
characters in 8-bit encoded text without changing all characters in the text to
multi-byte encoding. In order to aid developers in this situation, TET supports character
references, a method known from markup languages such as SGML and HTML.
TET supports all numeric character references and character entity references defined
in HTML 4.0, but in option lists they must be used without the ’&’ and ’;’ decoration.
Numeric character references can be supplied in decimal or hexadecimal notation
for the character’s Unicode value. The following are examples for valid character references
along with a description of the resulting character:
#173 soft hyphen
#xAD
soft hyphen
shy
soft hyphen
In addition to the HTML-style references above TET supports the custom character entity
names for control characters (see Table 10.1).
Table 10.1 Custom character entity names for control characters
Unicode character
(VB equivalents)
custom entity name
Unicode character
(VB equivalents)
custom entity name
U+0020 SP, space U+00AD SHY, shy
U+00A0 NBSP, nbsp U+000B
U+2028
U+0009 (VbTab) HT, hortab U+000A (VbLf)
U+000D (VbCr)
U+000D and U+000A
(VbCrLf)
U+0085
U+2029
VT, verttab
LS, linesep
LF, linefeed
CR, return
CRLF
NEL, newline
PS, parasep
U+002D HY, hyphen U+000C (VbFormFeed) FF, formfeed
122 Chapter 10: TET Library API Reference