I have seen a lot of questions regarding PDF's forms filled from a Website by using several PDF libraries but I can't find an straight answer to my concern. I have a very complex PDF that somebody built with LiveCycle, which includes things like buttons for dynamic addition of rows in tables.
I wonder if it is possible to fill this form from a Website's form or a DDBB, and if there is any library that can achieve things like adding the extra rows to the table and/or to peep inside the internal PDF's javascript to understand it's logic.
Adobe LiveCycle is not even an option, as their server solutions' prices, are far out of the mortals' reach.
Can anybody point me to the right direction?
It's possible if you hand write a parser (which is quite a feat..) but it's extremely difficult. It would probably be easiest to simply generate a new pdf with the needed information stored as static text.
After some experiments I have found that the only thing you need is to modify the XFA lines inside the XDP file which is contained inside the PDF (when it is a LiveCycle generated one) and everything will work.
An explanation can be found in here:
How can I merge data into an XDP file and return a PDF (via .NET)?
Related
Our company allows its clients to view reports via our website. The pages are php based and the data is collected from MySQL. These reports were written a long time ago and include inline css. The pages themselves look fine, but the print version is lacking. I want to take the reports and create visually appealing "printable" pages that contain our branding.
I have found three solutions so far.
#Media Print Stylesheets
This is the easiest method, but does not give me complete layout control. I want landscape mode and need to control where the page breaks occur so this method has been eliminated from my list of possible solutions. The reports are built by looping through PHP data, so while I can always put a page break after a or for example, I can't stop the page from breaking before it gets to the next set of data.
TCPDF/FPDF
From what I have seen these classes will give me all of the control I need to customer a PDF. The challenge is that this appears to be a little more advanced than my programming skills require, and all of the inline CSS contained within the HTML tables may throw off formatting.
FDF
I am leaning towards this method if I understand it correctly. First I would create a PDF form and define all of the fields to be populated by the MySQL data. Then I would create a FDF file that would populate the form template with the data from the database. It seems easier to me to create a visually pleasing form via PDF and then populate that form using this method, rather than create the entire pdf from scratch using method 2.
Does it sound like I am on the right track? Are any of these methods "easier" than the other?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
TCPDF has the most control of each page which is what I am looking for. It is extremely sensitive when writing HTML, but that is the only downside I have found so far.
There's this excellent answer on SO already.
If you're looking for easy, my money is on mPDF. I found it to be the easiest, and essentially an out-of-the-box solution (often zero server configuration to do).
I think you should try out wkhtmltopdf.
https://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
As for the TCPDF/FPDF pagination issue, you can see this other question for the solution provided and use the flow in it to sort yours out.
TCPDF / FPDF - Page break issue
Just found this other solution as well and think you'll need it
Convert HTML + CSS to PDF with PHP?
For me personally, FPDF works great to fetch data from my database, insert into the FPDF class and dynamically create PDF's for customers.
I see some people want to write HTML/CSS to create PDF's but you will always have
differences as the browser parses the HTML/CSS differently than when using it in PDF's.
When using FPDF's built-in method's, I have been able to get exactly what I wanted
and haven't seen any issues (yet).
We have a high-resolution PDF (for printing) which has some form fields on it. We would like to have an HTML form which submits to the PDF, which is then placed into the respective fields.
I found a solution on google: http://koivi.com/fill-pdf-form-fields/
However, with that solution you only get an FDF file... And the demo does not work for me, opening the FDF file simply downloads another FDF file.
Since this PDF will be available to the public we would like to keep it as simple as possible. If we must open our original PDF and import this FDF file, we need a different solution (which I'm not sure is what the FDF file is for, since it didn't work).
A related post talking about .net framework had the same idea, but there were only paid commercial solutions: From HTML form to PDF
The PHP solutions I have found so far are for creating a new PDF, which is not what I need. Our PDF is created with Adobe Illustrator (or a similar adobe product) and is high-res with embedded fonts, svg and image content.
The form elements are in place, we just need to get the data to there.
Update April 11, 2013:
Since posting this question I have been utilizing FPDF on multiple projects where I needed to accomplish this goal. Although it cannot seem to "merge" template PDFs with the provided data, it can create the PDF from scratch.
One example I have used, I had a high resolution PNG for printing (similar to initial question) which we had to write the customer's name and today's date clearly in the center. I simply made the background of the PDF using FPDF->Image() and write the text afterwards using FPDF->Text().
It was very simple after all, you will need to look up the paper sizes to determine the X,Y,W,H of the image and then base your text fields relative to those numbers.
There was even a Form Filling extension, but I couldn't get it to work.
It seems as though I should answer my own question, although Visions answer may be better (seems to be deleted?). I used Vasiliy Faronov's link which was a comment to my main question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1890835/200445
Here I found how to install pdftk and run a command to merge (flatten) my FDF and PDF files. I still used the "hacky" way to generate an FDF using Koivi's FDF Generator but it works for the most part.
One caveat is that some characters, like single and double quotes are not inserted correctly. It may be an issue of escaping the fields, but I could not find an answer.
Regardless, my PDF form generator is working, but anyone with a similar issue should look for a better solution.
There are number of tools which are not paid like itextsharp. try the following https://web.archive.org/web/20211020001747/https://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/030211-1.aspx Hope this code will help you. I have tried it its worked for me. If you can pay then there are number of paid tools which convert the HtML to PDF like ABCPDF etc.This example is in Asp.net and i am sure if you can convert it in PHP it will work for you too.
I'm currently doing a task where I'm taking forms from a local government body, and converting them so that they are able to have a PDF generated dynamically via FPDF based on passed parameters. Currently the only copies of these documents are in read-only pdf files. What I'm wondering is if there is a way to have these files read somehow to where these documents could be converted into FPDF format somehow? Normally I'd just create them manually, but with 50 files to convert, and with some being multiple page forms, it'll probably take months, and hence looking for a quicker way.
The short answer is you're stuck. As far as I and my many hours of research know there's no such process. I would love to be proven wrong.
I recently went through a similar situation with insurance forms. I used the free trial of Adobe Live Cycle Designer to build out the forms. It basically turns the old pdf into a flat background image you can draw form fields over. Then I used PDF Toolkit and PDFTK-PHP to populate the fields.
The process wasn't ideal but it worked out well enough. I setup 20 forms consisting of about 50 pages with filling code and some other operations in a week.
We currently use PDForm to grab a blank pdf file (no values, just form fields and text) and list the form fields. We then query our database for the values which match those field names and create a pdf file with the newly populated data which the user can download from our site. The thing is PDForm is about $5,000 per machine and we are migrating servers. We want an alternative which is actively supported and recommended by the community.
I know Zend is working on a PDF manipulation extension, but we need something quick. I have done testing with PDFtk but the last update for that project was in 2006 and it now seems dead. It would be fine as it is open source, however it seems to be causing errors with certain files that seem to be generated with PDFPenPro (our pdf form creator).
Another solution I thought up was why not just use iText and write a java wrapper which accepts command line input, so that PHP can call it with passthru() or exec(). There are other applications that will work should we completely rewrite our code but we do not want to do that.
What we need.
The ability for PHP to receive the PDF form field names.
PHP to then either create and FDF file (then merge it with the PDF) or send a string to a command line application which will populate the fields with values from our database.
The user can then download the newly created PDF file with the populated form fields.
Am I moving in the write direction by creating a java command line application that will use iText to parse and create the PDF files specified by PHP or does anyone know of any cost effective alternatives?
TCPDF seems to have the most robust feature set that I have seen so far.
Thanks, d2burke, for the tip on TCPDF. I'm not trying to do quite as much as the OP, but the software packages available to accomplish any kind of pdf generation are in the $2k to $3k range. TCPDF is php based, open source and the guy developing it is very supportive.
Always donate to these guys! Where in the world would web development be without it?
So since none of the above solutions would work since TCPDF doesn't work with forms the way we are wanting and since PDFlib converts the form fields to blocks we decided to create a command line wrapper for iText which will grab the form field names from the PDF and then populate them based on the database values.
I don't know if another product whose license costs range from $1k -> $3k could be considered "cost effective", but PDFlib work quite nicely. And if you don't need the PPS functionality, it does get cheaper.
I have spent a lot of time trying to get dompdf (http://www.digitaljunkies.ca/dompdf/) to work but I keep running into problems. I am trying to generate a PDF from a PHP script which generates a fairly complex, filled out web form. The script accepts a $_GET parameter (record number) and fills out the form accordingly with data from the database. I have no problem getting this data into the script as a string or any type of value really. What I am wondering is what the best approach would be for converting this type of data to a PDF?
The flow is as follows: user completes form and is taken to confirmation page which I would like to add a "Save as PDF" button. At this point one of two things could happen, the page that is currently being displayed in the browser could be spun directly to a pdf or a call to itself (scriptname.php?id=xyz) could be made using something like PHP's http_get() function and store the HTML as a string. From there I am having issues with preparing an accurate representation as a PDF.
I have heard some talk about fpdf but their examples don't really lead me to believe you can use dynamic data as the source, but please correct me if I am wrong about this.
Any input would be appreciated.
-- Nicholas
Well, I didn't know dompdf. Strange that it uses either a commercial library (PDFlib) or an outdated (?) one (CPDF, not updated for 3 years). But well, as long as it works (concept is interesting).
I don't understand what you mean by "use dynamic data as the source" (or rather, I see not point in generating static PDF!), but FPDF is used to generate various dynamic documents, like invoices in e-commerce products. I saw people using forks (like TCPDF) to handle Unicode data, though.
You can't transform an HTML page to PDF with FPDF, but you have a quite precise control of layout, using concept of cells with data.
You can see such kind of code there: http://svn.prestashop.com/trunk/classes/PDF.php
In the past when faced with this issue, I have used FPDF for the placement of data on a PDF template. Then, by setting the appropriate HTTP header, force the browser to pop open the Download / Save As box for the user to save said PDF.
In a class that extends FPDF/FPDI appropriately, use something like the following to generate a PDF from a template PDF you've already created (http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/fpdi/):
$this->setSourceFile('pdf_template.pdf');
$template_page = $this->importPage(1, '/MediaBox');
$this->useTemplate($template_page, 0, 0);
Then, have FPDF generate the PDF for output using:
$this->Output();
You can also extend FPDF to accept (limited) HTML for formatting using the script found here: http://www.fpdf.org/en/script/script41.php