Remove Form XObject from PDF

[eddprogrammer]

Hi,
First I would like to thank you for such a great project, learning something new every day as I use it more!

I would like to remove some Form XObject from the PDF file and not sure how to do that. I can get the xref by calling page.get_xobjects() and inspect the object info with doc.xref_object method. How do I remove it from the PDF file?

This is what I tried so far
doc.xref_set_key(page.xref, "Resources/XObject", "null")
And it got me exactly what I wanted, but I got an warning when opening the PDF in Adobe.

I can use page.clean_contents() before saving and it seems to get rid of that warning.

Just not sure if that is the right way to handle.

Thanks!

[JorjMcKie]

You are lucky that the problem got solved in this way. As it worked, your PDF should be okay.
for some background:
What you actually did remove, was the pointer to the xref of the XObject. Somewhere inside the possibly many /Contents objects, there still existed a reference to that XObject in the form of a command like /refname Do.
This is what caused that message. The clean_contents() method then cleaned up the situation.
If you instead would have manipulated the /Contents and removed that referencing instruction, there would have no message. But this always is a shaky thing to do, because of the possibly many /Contents which in addition may be arbitrarily nested.
So it was good luck it worked that way.

[eddprogrammer]

Appreciate the response there, hope there will be a more elegant way to remove both the reference in /Content and the the pointer to the xref of the XObject. I have seen in the other discussion on how to remove the referencing instruction, but if clean_contents() takes care of that, then that would work :)

Thanks again!

[occludedpixel]

Hi, is there any update on this? Specifically, I am trying to delete XObjects created using Page.show_pdf_page().

[JorjMcKie]

No updates here.