Ask HN: Tools for Writing to PDFs?

7 points by michaelmarkell 6y ago ↗ HN

I have a large number of PDF forms (think government applications) that I need to write data into. Right now we are doing it by hand, but I would love to find a tool that allows us to 1. Map some sort of schema to a PDF 2. On a POST request, generate a new PDF via the POST data and the mapping

Any recommendations for how to solve this?

3 comments

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celias 6y ago ↗

This article http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2018/05/22/filling-pdf-for... mentions pdfforms https://pypi.org/project/pdfforms/ which uses pdftk to fill forms.

michaelmarkell 6y ago ↗

Thanks for the suggestion! Seems like pdftk is quite outdated and doesn't work on latest OSx, so I'm going to explore other options for now

santa_boy 6y ago ↗

I used this a while back (https://github.com/galkahana/HummusJS) and it worked quite well. While the support has ended, I think it should still work.

Worth a try. HTH