Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
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Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
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Re: Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
#2Anyone familiar with the history of how PDFs became such a widespread format in the first place? I get that it looks nice but not being able to edit it by default just seems weird to me.
Re: Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
#3Anyone familiar with the history of how PDFs became such a widespread format in the first place? I get that it looks nice but not being able to edit it by default just seems weird to me.
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Re: Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
#4Anyone familiar with the history of how PDFs became such a widespread format in the first place? I get that it looks nice but not being able to edit it by default just seems weird to me.
This was posted on HN a while back and has some interesting bits of history and context:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pam43n/why-the-pdf-is-sec...
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19819789
Re: Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
#5Anyone familiar with the history of how PDFs became such a widespread format in the first place? I get that it looks nice but not being able to edit it by default just seems weird to me.
The “read only” nature of PDFs is a feature, not a bug. The idea being that once you distribute the PDF, it can’t be changed, and thus has more “truth” than something editable would. Even now PDF is considered an acceptable format for legal documents where Word docx is not. Of course this is completely false safety given that many programs can edit PDFs.
Re: Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
#6I've used (in PHP) TCPDF (was FPDF) and FPDi, FPDI extends TCPDF to import the PDF original (used as a background/template) and then TCPDF can write content (text, lines, shapes, images, etc.) on top of it.
Using fillable PDFs... A lot of PDFs I encountered didn't have fillable fields or were those provided not as large as I needed to fill properly, so mapped the content on top of the PDF ignoring any forms. (might not be possible if the forms preform some other function than just to populate the form)
Initially I would identify fields and create a form content database/array.
Overlay a grid on the "template PDF" with the TCPDF (point measurement is the PS/PDF standard) and hand determine the field location coordinates. (Making an HTML overlay won't cut it you need precise measurements.)
Add in some paging logic for handling multi page data, etc. and have it put it all together.
...
But PHP isn't one for signatures, so Python would be best...
Looking at resources like I've done in in PHP, you have to use two libraries - one to import the pages (with PYPDF2) and then to create the content on the imported page (pyfpdf). Looks like they are exclusive, bso you create content, then merge pdf template with content PDF.
Someone wrote an example: https://gist.github.com/dwayneblew/79da32727358b502f6ec
This should get you closer I think.
Re: Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
#7Anyone familiar with the history of how PDFs became such a widespread format in the first place? I get that it looks nice but not being able to edit it by default just seems weird to me.
Read up on Postscript specifically. There's some interesting history there, like Display Postscript.
Re: Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
#8I had a similar need at a company I worked for. My solution was actually quite similar to the author's #1 with the major exception being that I used ODG for LibreOffice Draw which mostly solves the author's two main complaints here. Background images can be high quality and placing your text is as easy as clicking where you want to place your text box.
The only other major difference is that I didn't interact with UNO. Since Open Document Format files are zipped XML files I extracted the content.xml and did regular expressions for my variables then replaced them.
We did have to do signatures as well but that turns out to be not THAT much of a pain. If you insert an image on top of your form manually then look at the resulting file you can pretty much copy the part of the XML that refers to the inserted image, insert the signature image into the ODG zip and make sure the names line up and it will work.
It's worth noting that the practice of editing complex XML with regular expressions is not always advisable. In my experience it works fairly reliably with ODG because the format remains simple. But, with ODT it can result in corrupted files quite easily because additional XML can lie inbetween the text letters of your variables. Then you'll be on a mission to find and ignore all the text markup like XML bold markers and span tags and paragraph markers and style tags.... before you know it your simple unzip regex rezip becomes a whole library.
Re: Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
#9Anyone familiar with the history of how PDFs became such a widespread format in the first place? I get that it looks nice but not being able to edit it by default just seems weird to me.
If you think that's crazy, wait until you hear about HTML!
Re: Filling in PDF forms with Python (2018)
#10There is more than one way to deal with this, unfortunately it's all quite messy. But it is possible.
One is to use Inkscape to layer the image as an OCG, the other is to treat the image as a "watermark" (which is really just another layer) with your image via PyPDF2 or similar.