Ghostscript Pdf Transparant Objects Removal

Question

I have several .pdf containing reoccuring transparent objects (text). (It has non transparant objects (text and vectors) as well as images)

Not watermarks made by Acrobat or others. It is in the background as styling.

To removing them manualy these is impossible, since the content on the pdf pages is mixed with the text on the page (grouping).

Is there a way to alter the opacity of translucent objects to 0. Or even removing them completely from the pdf, with ghostscript? Using adobe acrobat pre-flight, and moving them as images, removes all of the images in the pdf, instead of only the transparent objects.

• How can this be achieved with the help of Ghostscript and the appropriate PostScript code?

These Awnsers

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/29657475/9921462
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/37858893/9921462

Where helpful, to know how to get objects and images, but not filtering specifically for transparent objects.

Any ideas are appreciated as well.

Answer 1

I suspect that the reason you can't remove the objects using Acrobat is not because they are transparent. Its much more likely that they are described by a Form XObject. Those can't normally be edited by Acrobat.

You can use -dNOTRANSPARENCY and the pdfwrite device to produce a new PDF file with no transparency, but that will eliminate all the transparency in the output file.

Fundamentally there's no real way to do what you want, other than by manually editing the PDF file in an editor. You should go back to the original document and do the work there. PDF is not intended as an editable format.