PDF with or without transparency?

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Hi,

at this moment we receive a lot of PDF’s from our customers. That’s great but also sometimes hell…
We don’t know when a PDF is 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 or even 1.6. Ok, you can check every PDF individually but when you need to do that for a large bunch of files, you loose a lot of time. Therefor, I was wondering if Acrobat or Illustrator can be (Apple-)scripted to check transparencies in PDF’s. Is there a way to generate a applescript which shows if transparancy is used? So, when a PDF is checked by a script, the result is: no transparency or transparency. The reason is that we have difficulties in our workflow with flattened PDF’s…
Has anyone an idea?

regards,

Kris

#2

This is pretty easy actually.

You can use

set hasAlpha to (do shell script "sips -g hasAlpha " & quoted form of (posix path of theimage))

You can do this with Image Events too, by using metadata, but I find this method the most easy one.

#3

If you read the file as text/string, you’ll see that PDFs start with :

%PDF-1.3
or
%PDF-1.5

which I am pretty sure indicates the level.
Now that doesn’t really tell you about the individual interior parts. You could have a flattened 1.3 PDF placed in InDesign and re-PDF’d out with level 1.6, but it still has flattened image fragments inside of it.