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.
Related
I need to generate a large PDF, 2480 pages to be exact.
Currently I am using indesign, and while the output is exactly what I want.
I would rather not be involved in the document creation process.
It takes 31 minutes for indesign to execute the data merge, generate the pdf, save the pdf, and to save the pdf.indd file. (I dont really need the pdf.indd file, but I would rather not have to recreate the data merge if something were to happen to the pdf)
I am hoping for a php, or similar solution. Currently my data is stored in MySQL.
The majority of the pdf is static text, with 19 dynamically driven text fields.
There is one image on the pdf, 75x100px # 72dpi.
The output needs to be exact, the pdf file is printed and cut in half at 4.25 inches.
I have tried TCPDF, while it is fast at generating upto 50 pages, after that it would rather die than give me an output. I have also played with mPDF, and found it to be, ..., not as friendly. I have also considered generating many small files and using some utility to merge the smaller pdf's into one large pdf. Though that seems like driving around the mountain.
Any thoughts would be helpful.
You certainly can create documents directly with PHP, but it can be difficult. One method is to use one of the various PDF classes to create the document, as you have found. Another is to create images (using ImageMagic, GD, etc.) and convert those to PDF. (This method is less efficient, as you are creating raster graphics making the whole PDF page one giant graphic.)
However, I think you should consider simply scripting InDesign. InDesign has the capability to read data in via XML and create the document. This way, the design of your document isn't dependent on your programming abilities and you can still have the power of programmatically creating the document.
When it comes to huge number of pages in PDF, LaTeX is always the best answer. Nothing can really handle huge PDF generation as fast, accurate and elegant as LaTeX.
Check this question to see how to retrieve your data from the database.
I am working on an online time card system to replace the paper time cards. What I have done is create a webpage in PHP that takes the time in and out along with job description and other values the user inputs and stores them in a MySQL database. Everything is working just fine.
What I would like to work on next is to take the information from the database for the specific user and week and have it fill in a PDF template file I have created from scanning the old paper time card and making it into a PDF form. I dont know if this is possible I have been researching it online and all I can come up with is how to generate a new PDF file. I am hoping someone here can point me to a source of information on how to do this.
Here is an example of exactly what I want to do http://try.fillpdf-service.com/
Hi congratulation for you about done the 1st step in time,
You can use very complete pdf generator php class TCPDF
It started in 2002, TCPDF is now one of the world's most active Open Source projects, used daily by millions of users and included in thousands of CMS and Web applications.
http://www.tcpdf.org/ for genarating your pdf what kind your want this class has very useful documnet and simple to use
Cheers,
Farzam
Take a look ath this
http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
It can be invoked as a command line tool and among the other functions let fill form fields, (on an already existing PDF you supply).
Maybe FPDF is quite old, but still good to handle for PDF generation. Just take a Template PDF (create as you like) and put the informations you want on it. You will have to place your data on the specific positions, see the tutorial section for a better understanding.
Another popular solution is to use Zend_PDF from well known Zend Framework, but I think FPDF would be a tick easier to work with if you are not very experienced.
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 doing a bulk generation of pdf files based on templates and I ran into big performance issues pretty fast.
My current scenario is as follows:
get data to be filled from db
create fdf based on single data row and pdf form
write .fdf file to disk
merge the pdf with fdf using pdftk (fill_form with flatten command)
continue iterating over rows until all .pdf's are generated
all the generated files are merged together in the end and the single pdf is given to the client
I use passthru to give the raw output to the client (saves time writing file), but this is just a little performance improvements. The total operation time is about 50 seconds for 200 records and I would like to get down to at least 10 seconds in some way.
The ideal scenario would be operating all these pdfs in memory and not writing every single one of them to separate file but then the output would be impossible to do as I can't pass that kind of data to external tool like pdftk.
One other idea was to generate one big .fdf file with all those rows, but it looks like that is not allowed.
Am I missing something very trivial here?
I'm thanksfull for any advice.
PS. I know I could use some good library like pdflib but I am considering only open licensed libraries now.
EDIT:
I am up to figuring out the syntax to build an .fdf file with multiple pages using the same pdf as a template, spent few hours and couldn't find any good documentation.
After beeing faced with the same problem for a long time (wanted to generate my pdfs based on LaTeX) i finally decided to switch to another crude but effective technique:
i generate my pdfs in two steps: first i generate html with a template engine like twig or smarty. second i use mpdf to generate pdfs out of it. I tryed many other html2pdf frameworks and ended up using mpdf, it's very mature and is developed since a long time (frequent updates, rich functionality). the benefit using this technique: you can use css to design your documents (mpdf completely features css) - which comes along with the css benefit (http://www.csszengarden.com) and generate dynamic tables very easy.
Mpdf parses the html tables and looks for the theader, tfooter element and puts it on each page if your tables are bigger than one page size. Also you have the possibility to define page header and page footer elements with dynamic entities like page nr and so on.
i know, using this detour seems to be a workaround, but to be honest, no latex, pdf whatever engine is as strong and simple as html!
Try a different less complex library like fpdf (http://www.fpdf.org/)
I find it quite good and lite.
Always find libraries that are small and only do what you need them to do.
The bigger the library the more resources it consumes.
This won't help your multiple-page problem, but I notice that pdftk accepts the - character to mean 'read from standard input'.
You may be able to send the .fdf to the pdftk process via it's stdin, in order to avoid having to write them to disk.
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.