mule-pdfbox-module

Empower your MuleSoft flows with native PDF manipulation powered by Apache PDFBox. This connector provides high-performance PDF operations with no external dependencies.

PDF Manipulation

✓

• I would like to classify a PDF by its text before sending and therefore save on IDP charges
• Yes sure use Apache PDFBox - Extract Text

✓

• I would like to delete blank PDF pages before submitting to MuleSoft IDP to make the response more manageable and cheaper?
• Yes sure use Apache PDFBox - Split Pages

✓

• I have a PDF of XXX pages but only want to submit pages 1 and 4
• Yes sure use Apache PDFBox - Filter Pages

Value Adds

Key Features

• Metadata Extraction – Get author, title, number of pages, and more.
• Text Extraction – Pull text from a specific range of pages.
• Blank Page Removal – Clean your documents before delivery.
• Page Rotation – Rotate document pages as needed.
• PDF Splitting – Break large PDFs into separate single-page files.
• PDF Merging – Combine multiple PDFs into a single cohesive document

Built For Developers

• Lightweight, single-dependency module
• Designed using MuleSoft Java SDK
• Input/output via standard Java streams

Under the Hood

• Built using Apache PDFBox
• Fully compatible with Mule 4.x
• Handles page ranges and robust PDF parsing

Implemented Operations:

1. extractPdfInfo

• Purpose: Extracts document metadata such as number of pages, author, title, subject, and version.
• Input: InputStream of the PDF.
• Output: POJO with document properties.
• Under the Hood - PDFDocumentInformation

2. extractTextByPageRange

• Purpose: Extracts plain text from a given page range.
• Input: PDF stream + optional startPage / endPage.
• Output: Extracted text as a string.
• Under the Hood - PDFTextStripper

3. filterPages

• Purpose: Removes blank pages and/or filters based on a page range.
• Mechanism: Detects blankness using text visibility, annotations, and embedded images.
• Parameters: Page range, remove blank pages flag.
• Output: Filtered PDF stream.

4. rotatePages

• Purpose: Rotates pages within a specified range clockwise or counterclockwise.
• Parameters: Page range, rotation direction.
• Output: Modified PDF stream.
• Under the Hood - setRotation

5. splitPages

• Purpose: Splits a PDF into individual pages.
• Output: A list of InputStreams, each containing a single-page PDF.

6. mergePdfs (New 1.0.1)

• Purpose: Combines two or more PDF documents into one.
• Input: A list of PDF InputStreams.
• Output: A single merged PDF stream with extracted metadata.
• Under the Hood: PDFMergerUtility + RandomAccessReadBuffer