Glossary

A

AcroForm — The PDF mechanism for interactive fields such as text inputs, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, and buttons. An AcroForm field has a stored name and value. It is unrelated to a Form XObject. See Working with AcroForms.

Active session — The server-side working copy represented by an open PDFDancer client. Successful operations change this copy. The source file is not overwritten unless the application explicitly saves to the same path.

Anchor — Existing literal or regular-expression text used to choose the insertion caret immediately before or after a match. An anchor insertion differs from coordinate insertion because its position is derived from existing text.

Applied layout mode — The layout behavior actually used for one text change. It is reported in TextEditResponse.change. With reflowWhenSupported, it may be source-anchored even when reflow was requested. See Text Layout and Reflow.

B

Bounding rectangle — An axis-aligned rectangle described by x, y, width, and height in PDF points. Selected objects may expose one through their position data. See Positioning and Coordinates.

Builder — A fluent object used to collect and validate the inputs for a new object or text edit. Calling methods on a builder does not by itself change the PDF. New-content builders finish with add; text-edit builders finish with build, after which the result is passed to replace, insert, delete, or style.

C

Caret — A zero-width text position between characters. Anchor insertion chooses the caret immediately before or after matched text.

Clipping path — A PDF graphics-state boundary that limits which part of painted content is visible. Moving an image or Form XObject does not necessarily move or remove the clipping path affecting it. Clear clipping only when the clipped boundary is no longer intended.

CommandResult — The result returned by many image and path transformations. Its fields report whether the operation succeeded, a message, an optional warning, and the affected element identifier. Other operations can return booleans or specialized response types; check the method's documented return type.

Coordinate insertion — Text insertion at an explicit one-based page number and (x, y) position. Because there is no source text from which to inherit appearance, the edit must provide a font and positive font size.

D

Detected text unit — The layout structure PDFDancer associates with selected characters, such as a paragraph, list item, heading, table cell, or fixed-layout line. Reflow recomposes this unit rather than treating the replacement as an isolated string.

Diagnostic — Structured information associated with a text change, warning, or error. Depending on the result, it can include the page, operation, source and result text, requested and applied layout, element identifiers, and reflow-unit identifiers.

Document scope — An operation started from pdf. Object selectors search all pages, and text edits can match throughout the document unless their definition limits eligible pages.

E

Element identifier — An identifier returned in selected objects or operation diagnostics. It identifies PDFDancer's representation of an element in the active session. Do not treat it as a permanent business identifier across unrelated PDFs or sessions.

Embedded font — A font program or subset stored inside the PDF. Existing text can render with an embedded font even when that embedded data cannot encode newly introduced characters. See Working with Fonts.

F

Form XObject — A reusable PDF content stream that can be painted on one or more pages. It can contain text, images, paths, or other graphics. It is not an interactive AcroForm field. See Working with Form XObjects.

H

Hyphenation override — The optional hyphenationEnabled setting on a reflowing text edit. It controls generated discretionary hyphenation for that edit. It does not change hyphens already present in supplied text and is invalid with source-anchored layout.

L

Literal text target — Exact text supplied to a text-edit builder. It can be refined with case sensitivity, whole-word matching, maximum matches, and page restrictions.

O

Object selector — An SDK method that returns existing typed objects, such as selectImages() or select_form_fields_by_name(...). A plural selector returns a collection; a singular selector returns one match or the language's empty value. See Finding Existing Objects.

P

Page scope — An operation started from pdf.page(n), where n is a one-based page number. Selection, building, or text editing is restricted to that page.

PDF point — The unit used for PDF user-space coordinates and dimensions. One inch equals 72 points. A point is not a CSS pixel.

Position tolerance — The distance in points allowed by a coordinate selector. Point selectors default to 0.01 point. Increasing tolerance can find objects near rounded coordinates but can also produce multiple matches.

R

Reflow — Recomposition of a detected text unit after replacement, insertion, deletion, or styling. Depending on the selected profile, following text can move horizontally or wrap onto recalculated lines.

Reflow profile — The composition strategy used when a layout mode attempts reflow:

• DEFAULT chooses a strategy from the detected layout type.
• BODY_TEXT composes every selected unit as prose and can recalculate line breaks.
• NO_REFLOW moves following text horizontally while preserving existing line boundaries.

Regular-expression text target — A regular expression used to identify text for an edit. It is an editing target, not a general text-extraction result.

S

Singular selector — A convenience method returning the first matching object. No match is represented by None in Python, null in TypeScript, and Optional.empty() in Java. Use a plural selector when multiple objects could satisfy the criteria.

Source-anchored layout — Text placement that keeps every unaffected glyph at its original coordinates. Replacement or inserted text starts at the selected source position, so longer inline text can overlap what follows.

Style run — A contiguous range of text with shared appearance properties. A style operation can target runs by attributes such as font, size, color, or spacing.

T

Text client — The value returned by pdf.text() or pdf.page(n).text(). It exposes the four v2 text operations: replace, insert, delete, and style.

TextEditResponse — The result of a v2 text operation. matched reports eligible targets, changed reports applied changes, pagesChanged reports affected one-based pages, change contains per-change details, and warnings and errors report nonfatal fallbacks and unapplied work.

Text operation — One call to replace, insert, delete, or style. The accompanying class—such as TextReplaceRequest—describes the target, desired change, scope, and layout behavior. In this documentation, “operation” refers to this SDK action; “HTTP request” is used explicitly when discussing transport behavior.

W

Whole-word matching — A literal-target option requiring word boundaries around the supplied text. It prevents a target such as cat from matching the same characters inside a longer word such as catalog.

Language naming

The three SDKs expose the same concepts with language-appropriate naming:

Concept	Python	TypeScript	Java
Page scope	pdf.page(1)	pdf.page(1)	pdf.page(1)
Select images	select_images()	selectImages()	selectImages()
Move an object	move_to(x, y)	moveTo(x, y)	moveTo(x, y)
Reflow if available	reflow_when_supported(...)	reflowWhenSupported(...)	reflowWhenSupported(...)
Require reflow	require_reflow(...)	requireReflow(...)	requireReflow(...)
No singular match	None	null	Optional.empty()