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.
Related
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)?
I am working on a project that allows a user to upload text or content from an HTML page in Japanese and then use their cursor to select words in the text/content to translate into English. However, I would like to be able to expand this functionality to PDF files. Essentially, I'd like the user to be able to submit a PDF file and have the browser render that PDF file in such a way that when the user selects/highlights words in the PDF, the browser can somehow relay what the text of the highlighted section is, such as via javascript, to be then relayed to a PHP variable.
I know there are a lot of posts on stackoverflow asking similar questions (I've spent hours upon hours trying to sort through them all!), but I can't seem to find a definitive answer on whether this is possible. It seems there are lots of options for converting PDF to HTML or extracting text from PDF, but to be quite honest, I'm confused if any of those options are relevant to what I am trying to accomplish. And I know there's a javascript API for Adobe, but I'm under the impression the javascript needs to be embedded in the PDF already, which will not be true if the user is uploading their own PDF files to render. Even if that is possible, it seems there's no native text selection support in the Adobe javascript API....
Is there a straightforward workaround (oxymoron?) to doing this? Again, I want to be able to pass text selected in a PDF to a variable -- the effect is the user highlights words they don't know so those words can be added to a word bank for retrieval in a dictionary.
Let me know if I can be clearer on anything. Thank you!
I think your best bet is to convert the PDF to HTML (see this answers) and then you are already set as you already implemented everything for regular HTML.
I want to generate PDF from a PHP file that includes HTML controls like textbox, and textarea. I attached CSS in the same. I tried FPDF, DOMPDF and TCPDF, but still I don't get exactly what I want. How do I pass HTML controls with PHP variables and CSS to these libraries?
mpdf is another option that you could try.
EDIT :
Found another solution for it, TCPDF is a FLOSS PHP class for generating PDF documents. Looks more dominating library.
"PRINCEXML" is a good library (not completely free now).
Others:
If your meaning is to create a PDF file from PHP, pdflib will help you (as some other suggested).
Else, if you want to convert an HTML page in PDF via PHP, you'll find
a little trouble outta here.. For three years I have been trying to do it as best as I
can.
So, the options I know are:
HTML2PS: same of DOMPDF, but this one convert first in .ps
(Ghostscript), then, in whatever format you need (PDF, JPEG, PNG). For
me it is a little better than dompdf, but I have the same speed problem.. Oh,
it has better compatibility with CSS.
Those two are PHP classes, but if you can install some software on the
server, and access it through passthru() or system(), have a look at
these too:
wkhtmltopdf: based on webkit (safari's wrapper), is really fast and
powerful... It seem like it is the best one (atm) for converting HTML pages to PDF on the fly, taking only two seconds for a three pages XHTML document
with CSS 2. It is a recent project. Anyway, the Google Code page is often
updated.
htmldoc: this one is a tank, it really never stops orcrashes... The project
seems to have died in 2007, but anyway if you don't need CSS compatibility
this can be nice for you.
** Thumbs Up For Strae.
If I understand your needs correctly I don't think any PHP-PDF class would do that.
Mostly you could insert only text and images to a PDF file, so if you would want something that looks like an HTML element you would need to insert it as an image.
Usually just putting HTML doesn't mean all your elements would stay intact in the PDF . (Different world, after all)
http://www.fpdf.org/ is the site having a great HTML-to-PDF class which work well. I am using it, but you have to first study its functionality and then start.
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.
First of all my apologies to all the people who think this question is a repeated one or they find a similar question to this.
I am working on a project in which I have an online form and some PDFs stored on the server.
Functionality
On the submit action I have to get the data from the form, fill it to the copy of PDF and finally download it.
Approach
I followed these steps to achieve this functionality:
Converted the pdfs to html with this http://www.pdfdownload.org/free-pdf-to-html.aspx online tool.
Embedded the html with form variables and regenerated the PDFs with this library / dompdf library.
Problem
The approach is a brute force one as the html generated are far away from the real ones. So lot of effort is wasted in adjusting the html.
The process is so slow and not reliable as most of the time I get memory error or some other issues.
I need to to automate this process. What I have found through searching is I should create an FDF file that contains my variable and pass it to the PDF using some library and then download it.
I am able to create the FDF file but missing any library in PHP (I found one in JAVA) that I can use to create the PDF and download it. One library that I found is pdf tool kit but that is a command line tool and I am not able to use it on the server at run time and download the PDF file.
Anybody having done this before please help.
(Sorry for this long post)
Thanks,
Madhup
Check out FPDI. It allows you to load some existing PDF, draw on it programatically, and output a new PDF. Which, if I read your question right, is what you're trying to do.
There's some example code here.