pdfsnoop 0.1.0

GUI for exploring PDF internals

pdfsnoop

A GTK desktop tool for exploring PDF internals.

feature	screenshot
content disassembly
page preview/font highlighting
annotation highlighting

What it does

Opens a PDF file and displays its internal object tree, allowing you to inspect dictionaries, arrays, streams, and indirect references. Selecting an object in the tree shows its contents in a detail pane. For page objects, a rendered preview is shown. Content streams are disassembled into annotated PDF operators.

Selecting certain objects highlights them on the page preview:

• Font objects — highlights text using that font in yellow
• Annotation objects — highlights the annotation rectangle
• Link annotations — highlights the link rectangle in blue

Installation

Requires Python 3.10+, GTK 3, and Poppler.

On Debian/Ubuntu you may need system packages:

sudo apt install python3-gi python3-gi-cairo gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-poppler-0.18 libgirepository-2.0-dev

If your repo doesn't have libgirepository-2.0-dev, try libgirepository1.0-dev. (One less hyphen!)

Then either run

sudo apt install pipx
pipx install pdfsnoop --system-site-packages

or if that doesn't work, run these commands to install manually:

SNOOPDIR=~/software/pdfsnoop  # or wherever you like
mkdir -p $SNOOPDIR && cd $SNOOPDIR
python -m venv --system-site-packages pdfsnoop-venv
source pdfsnoop-venv/bin/activate
git clone https://github.com/qooxzuub/pdfsnoop
pip install ./pdfsnoop

For the second method, if you add $SNOOPDIR/pdfsnoop-venv/bin to your PATH then running pdfsnoop should work.

Usage

pdfsnoop file.pdf

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Action
j / k	Move down / up
h / l	Collapse / expand node
g	Jump to page number
e	Edit value inline or stream in $EDITOR
s	Extract stream or image
f	Normalize content stream
w	Save PDF as...
/ or Ctrl+F	Search
q	Quit

License

Mozilla Public License 2.0