How do i use an existing PDF and fill out the information given by the user online or in a java program. I know itext and pdfbox are used but they are all showing documentation to create a new pdf and then fill out the information. My problem is that I need to take an existing PDF and fill out the information there which will be collected online by the user. So for example, creating a online Tax softwrare and filling out that information to PDF in Backend?? Please help or guide me to the right direction, thank you
Please take a look at the reporting examples. They involve an existing PDF: state.pdf that can be filled out in different ways. One could fill out the PDF and submit it, as is done in the example from my book: subscribe.pdf. Unfortunately, a number of PDF viewers (such as Chrome PDF viewer) don't support this. You can also fill out an HTML form and use the data to fill out the PDF. See for instance the iText samples I prepared for a tutorial video. You can pre-fill a form or flatten it.
The standalone examples can be found on itextpdf.com; the web app examples are available on github.
Some additional remarks:
The examples explain how to work with AcroForm technology. They don't discuss XFA.
If you intend to create a commercial product, please understand that you may need to purchase a license for your use of iText.
Tax authorities of different countries (including the IRS in the US) are a customer of iText Software, using iText in the exact way you're describing.
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I have a sample PDF which is having some placeholders, from which I need to generate PDF with Dynamic values in place of 'placeholders'. I need to do this in Java technologies. What should be the approach?
(Note: sample PDF having placeholders, Table structures, paragraphs, Stylesheets).
We, as iText team, has been receiving this exact question more and more everyday since many people/organisations want to generate custom filled PDF files with data they have. Many of them design forms in PDF and then they fill in the form programmatically. However there are problems with this solution: 1. You need license for a product where you will design the form 2. You need license (if applicable) for the PDF library to fill in the form 3. You (with your team) need to spend time to write the code where you fill in the form 4. You need to repeat all those each time you want to update your form etc. 5. Your form is most likely a static form, meaning that, for example, in case of an invoice you need to foresee how many rows you need to put in your form when designing it. What happens if users have more items than you foresee? You can use XFA forms but you probably know the cost of the designer and all other problems that come along with this deprecated technology.
We, as iText, bring a solution to all those problem just like we did in other tools we have. The solution is called iText DITO in which you design your PDF template in a WYSIWYG browser based editor. No coding is needed. If you want extra styling in your PDF, you can add CSS at any time. You can specify data-binding to elements in your design. Once you are done with your design, your project is basically ready to be deployed. If you need to generate tons of high-quality PDF files based on your template, you will use iText DITO back-end SDK to push your custom data (linking to data binding you have in your template) and your PDF files are created instantly.
I want to create a table programatically as like this PDF FCController.pdf.
As you see columns are Date, Name, Category, Amount. And I want to add a datepicker to change the list.
Can I generate a PDF as I said? Is it possible by Itext?
You want to embed a .swf file inside a PDF as a RichMedia annotation as explained in chapter 16 of "iText in Action - Second Edition". The book had two examples that showed you how to do this:
FestivalCalendar1 resulting in festival_calendar1.pdf
FestivalCalendar2 resulting in festival_calendar2.pdf
Although these examples work to some extend, I would urge you not to use this technology. Steve Jobs refused to support Flash on Apple devices and that started the decline of Flash as a technology. Adobe introduced support for Flash as RichMedia in PDF in one of their extensions to ISO-32000-1, but I know from insiders at Adobe that they regretted this. In any case: this functionality is not going to make it into ISO-32000-2 (PDF 2.0), which means that:
no other PDF viewers than Adobe Reader will have any interest in supporting this functionality, and
Adobe may decide to discontinue support for this functionality.
The example you've shared is nice, and it's not impossible to create such a PDF, but you should reconsider: it's not a future-proof solution.
I have a project, i have to get title,author informations from inside of the PDF file(not from metaData). So i try to read text from PDF by given coordinates and try to get fonts of texts.
Is there any way to do that, can anyone give advise ? Or is there another solutions to do my project?
Thanks for every help and thought you're sharing with me.
There are multiple PDF libraries for Java which allow you to extract text, my favourite being iText, as examples for text parsing have a look at ExtractPageContentArea and other examples from chapter 15 of iText in Action, 2nd edition.
Currently there is no example making use of the font information, but the information is available to the RenderListeners.
I want to generate interactive charts in PDF just like Google charts
but this is for embedding on web page I want to embed interactive chart in PDF. any help?
You specified Java, so I would say iText has some partial support for writing adobe-javascript actions. You must be aware that latest versions of itext uses AGPL license, so you must pay a commercial license if you want to use this in a commercial closed-source application.
Another option is to use Adobe Acrobat SDK, but I am not sure if you will be able to use it from Java.
You may also find this link useful: Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Guide - Adobe
This feature of the PDF specification (I mean embedded javascript) is not commonly used, so it might be a bit difficult to find start-up information and sample code.
Here you will find a few examples of interactive PDFs that use javascript, there is even an example of a flying helicopter in 3D, (it actually moves around while viewing the file).
I wrote a web app for generating PDF by filling data into a pre-saved PDF template, template edited by acrobat, with some text-fields. But the context of those text-fields seems in a different layer and cannot affect other existing words in template.
... But I want it affect the existing words and make them flow base on how many data fill into the text-fields.
The solution maybe use program to generate a whole PDF instead of using template. But the template changes really often in my case, I don't want waste a lot of time to adjust the position and format by coding...
Do anyone know how to use text-field with auto flow in a PDF template? just like a Word document.
PDF doesn't work like that. You need to generate the whole PDF.
Ah... but from what?
There are quite a few HTML->PDF converters out there. You could fill in your template HTML, and convert it that way.
You could develop your own input format (for your template), and write an app that reads it and builds a PDF.
The later is similar enough to HTML->PDF, that unless you can't find a converter that handles some PDF feature or other you need, I'd just go that route. There are LOTS of html->pdf apps out there. You can search SO, google, whatever. Lots.