Question: I've created a pdf with a table using itextsharp. I found an example at <http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ch05.html>. Now I'd like to read data from the table again using itextsharp. I can't find any documentation on how to read this data. Can someone give me an example?

Answer: 
Unfortunately you can't do this in iTextSharp. The section entitled ["Advanced: reading PDF" on the iTextSharp page](http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ch01.html) at SourceForge says:

> 
> The pdf format is just a canvas where
>  text and graphics are placed without
>  any structure information. As such
>  there aren't any 'iText-objects' in a
>  PDF file. In each page there will
>  probably be a number of 'Strings', but
>  you can't reconstruct a phrase or a
>  paragraph using these strings. There
>  are probably a number of lines drawn,
>  but you can't retrieve a Table-object
>  based on these lines. In short:
>  parsing the content of a PDF-file is
>  NOT POSSIBLE with iText. Post your
>  question on the newsgroup
>  news://comp.text.pdf and maybe you
>  will get some answers from people that
>  have built tools that can parse PDF
>  and extract some of its contents, but
>  don't expect tools that will perform a
>  bullet-proof conversion to structured
>  text.
> 
> 
>
I also need to read the data from the PDF. What I ended up doing was converting the PDF to text and then string parse the result to get to the data.

In my scenario I wanted to take the data in the tables and convert them to Excel.