I have to create a pdf using itext which will contain a button, when clicked should add a row in an existing PdfPTable. I wrote some code to create a PushbuttonField. While trying to set action I can only find PdfAction.javaScript. I am not able to figure out how to add a row in a table. I tried searching online but all I could find is PdfAction.javaScript
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
When you create a PDF file, you draw text, lines and shapes to a canvas. That is also what happens when you add a PdfPTable to a Document. If you look at the syntax of the PDF page, you won't recognize a table. You'll find text (the content of the cells), lines (the borders), and shapes (the backgrounds), but you won't find a table. If the table is distributed over different pages, the "table" on one page won't know that it is related to the "table" on the other page.
Sure, you can add semantic structure to the document by introducing marked content, and by creating a structure tree, but that mechanism which we call Tagged PDF can't be used to make the PDF "editable" the same way a Word document is editable. Tagged PDF is (among others) used to allow assistive technology to present the content to the visually impaired (e.g. in the context of PDF/UA). The presence of structure doesn't change the fact that all text, all lines, and all shapes are added at absolute positions.
This is very different from HTML where the position on a page of a <table>, <tr>, <th>, or <td> is calculated at the moment the page is rendered. In HTML this position can even change when you resize the browser window.
There is no such thing in PDF (except if you use XFA (*), a technology that is deprecated since ISO 32000-2). All content on a page has a fixed position, hardcoded into the page's content stream. Changing the size of the PDF viewer window won't change anything to the position of the page content.
Because of all of this, your question is invalid. It is impossible to create a button in PDF that adds a row to a table, because:
In many cases there is no table: there is just a bunch of text, lines, and shapes at absolute positions,
Even if there is the notion of a table (using Tagged PDF): the visual represenation of that table is fixed at creation time, it can't be changed at consumption time.
You want to use an ordinary PDF viewer as if it were a PDF editor. That is impossible for all the reasons listed above.
(*) XFA was deprecated for different reasons. One of the most important reasons it is the lack of support for XFA. There aren't many viewers that support XFA. If you would post a follow-up question asking *"How can I create an XFA document?", the answer would be: "Don't do this!" Creating XFA is extremely complex, and once you've succeeded in creating an XFA form, you'll discover that many of your customers won't be able to consume the file because their viewer doesn't support the format.
Related
Let me start off with saying that I've seen some questions in this regard but nothing actually specifically answering my issue.
Let's say I have a template version of a PDF received by someone else. It's a classic PDF that looks like a form but only one part is editable, the other parts are not because they are being filled in with data from an imported excel sheet. (Sadly I can't show an example)
I've been able to do most in iText 7 but I can't figure out for the life of me if I can change a flat text field into an editable form field, like on image 1.
Image 2 shows checkboxes that I want to make editable as well but I can only change their value within java and even then it only shows a cross, not a checkmark (even if I change the checktype).
It's a bit hard to explain but tl:dr is that I just want to know whether I can edit an existing flat PDF in java or if I have to do so in adobe itself.
Thanks
I am trying to combine two or more pdf documents so that the pieces on each document appear on one page in a new pdf.
The pieces on each document contain a form with multiple fields, but the forms only take up a fraction of a page. I know the typical way to merge documents in iText is PdfCopy.addDocument(reader), but I don't want each doucment on it's own page.
Is there a way to copy the fields and/or acroform of each document and put it into a new document where the snippets flow one right after another?
One way I have been thinking about doing this is creating a table with one column in a new document and adding each snippet into a cell, but I haven't been able to get it yet and I don't know if that is even possible.
Or is there a way to make the form a template and copy the template and put it into a cell in a table or on a new document? I don't want the template for the entire page, just the form with the fields.
I also realize that PDF is page-based, but I was hoping there would be a way to combine two pdf pages with form fields onto one page. Also, my fields do not need to be interactive. The forms are already filled out and can be flattened if they need to be.
Is there any way to get number of paragraphs or content of given paragraph in pdf file using iText library ?. I saw some classes like Paragraph, Chunk in some code to create new pdf file but I can not find any way to get these classes in reading file. Every idea is appreciated
Is the PDF you're talking about a Tagged PDF? If not, you are making the wrong assumptions about PDF. In a PDF, content is drawn on a page. For instance: an iText PdfPTable is converted into text state operators that draw snippets of text to a canvas, as well as graphics state operators that draw paths and shapes. If the PDF isn't tagged, the lines don't know that they are borders of a table; a word doesn't know to which cell it belongs.
The same goes for paragraphs: a snippet of text doesn't know whether it belongs to a sentence, to a paragraph, to a title line,...
Due to the very nature of PDF, what you're looking for may be impossible (using iText or any other software product), or may require heuristics (artificial intelligence) to examine all text state operators and the semantics of the content to get a result that mimics how humans would interpret text.
It's very easy to achieve if your PDF is tagged correctly. See the ParseTaggedPdf example.
I have a scenario where I need a Java app to be able to extract content from a PDF file in one of 2 modes: TEXT_ONLY or ALL. In text mode, only visible text ("visible" as if a human being was reading the PDF) is read out into strings. In all mode, all content (text, images, etc.) is read out of the file.
For instance, if a PDF file was to have 1 page in it, and that page had 3 paragraphs of contiguous text, and was word-wrapping 2 images, then TEXT_ONLY would extract all 3 paragraphs, and ALL would extract all 3 paragraphs and both images:
while(page.hasMoreText())
textList.add(page.nextTextChunk());
if(allMode)
while(page.hasMoreImages())
imageList.add(page.nextImage());
I know Apache Tika uses PDFBox under the hood, but am worried that this kind of functionality is shaded/prohibited by Tika (in which case, I probably need to do this directly from PDFBox).
So I ask: is this possible, and if so, which library is more appropriate for me to use? Am I going about this entirely the wrong way? Any pitfalls/caveats I am not considering here?
To expound some aspects of why #markStephens points you towards some resources giving some background on PDF.
In text mode, only visible text ("visible" as if a human being was reading the PDF) is read out into strings.
Your definition "visible" as if a human being was reading the PDF is not yet very well-defined:
Is text 1 pt in size visible? When zooming in, a human can read it; in standard magnification not, though. Which size would be the limit?
Is text in RGB (128, 129, 128) in a background of (128, 128, 128) visible? How different have the colors to be?
Is text displayed in some white noise pattern on a background of some other white noise pattern visible? How different have patterns to be?
Is text only partially on-screen visible? If yes, is one visible pixel enough? And what about some character 'I' in a giant size where the visible page area fits into the dot on the letter?
What about text covered by some annotation which can easily be moved, probably even by some automatically executed JavaScript code in the file?
What about text in some optional content group only visible when printing?
*...
I would expect most available PDF text parsing libraries to ignore all these circumstances and extract the text, at most respecting a crop box. In case of images with added, invisible OCR'ed text the extraction of that text in general is desired.
For instance, if a PDF file was to have 1 page in it, and that page had 3 paragraphs of contiguous text, and was word-wrapping 2 images, then TEXT_ONLY would extract all 3 paragraphs, and ALL would extract all 3 paragraphs and both images:
PDF (in general) does not know about paragraphs, just some groups of glyphs positioned somewhere on the page. Recognizing paragraphs is a task which cannot be guaranteed to work properly as there are heuristics at work. If, furthermore, you have multicolumn text with an irregular separation, maybe even some image in between (making it hard to decide whether there are two columns divided by the image or whether there is one column with an integrated image), you can count on recognition of the text flow let alone text elements like paragraphs, sections, etc. to fail miserably.
If your PDFs are either properly tagged or all generated by a tool chain for which patterns in the created PDF content streams betray text structures, you may be more lucky. In case of the latter, though, your solution would have to be custom-made for that tool chain.
but am worried that this kind of functionality is shaded/prohibited by Tika (in which case, I probably need to do this directly from pdfBox).
There you point towards another point of interest: PDFs can be marked that text extraction is forbidden while they otherwise can be displayed by anyone. While technically PDFs marked like that can be handled just like documents without that mark with just one decoding step (essentially they are encrypted with a publicly known password), doing so is clearly acting against the declared intention of the author and violating his copyright.
So I ask: is this possible, and if so, which library is more appropriate for me to use? Am I going about this entirely the wrong way? Any pitfalls/caveats I am not considering here?
As long as you expect 100% accuracy for generic input, you should reconsider your architecture.
If the PDFs are all you have and a solution as effective is possible is OK, on the other hand, there are multiple possible libraries for you, iText, and PDFBox to name but two while there are more. Which is best for you depends on more factors, e.g. on whether you need some generic solution or all PDFs are created by a tool chain as above.
In any case you'll have to do some programming yourself, though, to fine-tune them for your use case.
We have a requirement where we already have pre printed stationery and want user to put data in a HTML form and be able to print data on that form. Alignment/text size etc are very important since the pre-printed stationery already has boxes for each character. What could be a good way to achieve this in java? I have thinking of using jasper reports. Any other options? May be overlay image with text or something?
Also we might need to capability to print on plain paper in which case the boxes needs to be printed by our application and the form should match after the printed with the already printed blank stationery containing data.
Do we have some open source framework to do such stuff?
Jaspersoft reports -- http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasperreports/
You will then create XML templates, then you will be able to produce a report in PDF, HTML, CSV, XLS, TXT, RTF, and more. It has all the necessary options to customize the report. Used it before and recommend it.
You will create the templates with iReport then write the code for the engine to pass the data in different possible ways.
check http://www.jaspersoft.com/jasperreports
Edit:
You can have background images and overlay the boxes over it and set a limit on the max character size ... and many more
It is very powerful and gives you plenty of options
Here is one of iReport's tutorial for a background image http://ireport-tutorial.blogspot.com/2008/12/background-image-in-ireport.html
The big problem when printing form content that has been filled in electronically, is aligning it correctly on the pre-printed form. You may get content to align for one printer, but when you use another it is completely misaligned.
Fly Software have a form design product called InForm Designer that gets around the problem nicely by allowing users to specify and save vertical and horizontal offsets for printers. This ensures filled in form content is always aligned. I've tried it and it works perfectly. Take a look for yourself here...
http://www.flysoftware.com/products/inform_designer/overview.asp
It might be worth implementing a printer offset similar to InForm's in your own application (if possible).
Some things to think about.
First in terms of the web page, do you want use the stationery as the form layout?
Does it have to be exact?
Combed boxes (one for each character)
Do you want to show it like that on the web page, or deal with the combing later.
How are you going to deal with say a combed 6 digit number. Is this right aligned. What if they enter 7 digits. Same for text. what if it won't fit.
Font choices, we had a lot of fun with W...
How aligned do you want the character within the box, what font limitations does that imply, some of the auto magic software we looked at did crap like change the size of each character.
Combed editing is a nightmare, we display combed, but raise an edit surface the size of the full box on selection.
Another thing that might drive you barking mad, you find find small differences in the size and layout of the boxes, so they look okay from a distance but a column of boxes sort of shifts about by a pixel. Some of testing guys had to lend us their electron microscopes, so we could see how many ink molecules we were out by. :(
Expect to spend a lot of time in the UI side of things, and remember printed stationery changes, so giving yourself some sort of meta description of the form to start with will save you loads of trouble later on.