Extracting Text Within a Specific Rectangle in PDF Documents

Updated on Jun 5, 2026

Environment

Version	Product	Author
2024.2.426	RadPdfProcessing	Desislava Yordanova

Description

Learn how to extract the text from specific rectangular areas within PDF pages.

Solution

To extract text from a specific rectangle or crop box within a PDF page, use the TextFragment class together with its MatrixPosition property. The following example loads a PDF document, defines a rectangle for the target area, and iterates through the text fragments on each page. If the position of a text fragment falls within the specified rectangle, the code outputs the text.

csharp

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string originalFilePath = @"WinForms PdfViewer.pdf";
            PdfFormatProvider provider = new PdfFormatProvider();
            RadFixedDocument croppedDocument = provider.Import(File.ReadAllBytes(originalFilePath));
            Rect middleRectangle = new Rect(croppedDocument.Pages.First().Size.Width/2, croppedDocument.Pages.First().Size.Height / 3, croppedDocument.Pages.First().Size.Width, croppedDocument.Pages.First().Size.Height / 3);

            foreach (RadFixedPage currentPage in croppedDocument.Pages)
            {
                foreach (var contentElement in currentPage.Content)
                {
                    TextFragment textFragment = contentElement as TextFragment;

                    if (textFragment != null)
                    {
                        string currentText = (contentElement as TextFragment).Text;
                        if (currentText==" ")
                        {
                            continue;
                        }
                        MatrixPosition position = textFragment.Position as MatrixPosition;
                        if (middleRectangle.Contains(position.Matrix.OffsetX, position.Matrix.OffsetY))
                        {
                            Debug.Write(currentText);
                        }
                }
            }
        }

The following screenshot shows the cropped middle part of the page:

The Output console displays the detected text:

See Also

• RadPdfProcessing Documentation
• TextFragment
• MatrixPosition