Details
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New Feature
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Status: Open
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Minor
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Resolution: Unresolved
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None
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None
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None
Description
The PDFBox Debugger is a great tool for analyzing PDF documents due to its functionality and licence.
However, it is constrained to what PDFBox itself can do. We extended the Debugger to accomplish some of the more frequent tasks needed for processing service tickets for our own software product.
Some of the extended functionality relies on our proprietary PDF processing (this is completely separate from PDFBox) but other features rely on Implementations around PDFBOX functionality (such as drawing PrintBoxes or moving them, removing document security attributes for subsequent analysis in other tools, removing all text to get rid of sensitive data etc.).
There is also functionality that relies on Java-Libraries like VeraPDF, OpenPDF or even calls to external command line tools like ghostscript and pdfcpu (the latter with bundled binaries, the former without because of GPL).
We would very much like to publish and contribute Plugins for the Debugger but as of now, everything is based on a direct extension (even using some Reflection) of the PDFDebugger class and thus can not be made available in source for public (as it also relies on our proprietary PDF code). Furthermore, dependencies to external software or third party PDF libraries really should not be directly integrated in the main PDFBox repositories and therefore I wouldn't know how to contribute back to the PDFBox project.
I do however not see any harm in having such dependencies for plugins that are provided in different repositories and possibly developed and maintained by other developers. So I do see a benefit in having a Plugin-Interface in PDFDebugger.
Most likely the group of people making and using such plugins is rather small but I still wanted to run the idea by you in case you are interested.
I am also willing to work on this feature if I am provided with some input as to what you expect.
