PDFBOX PS TO PDF PDF
PDFBOX PS TO PDF MODS
PDFBOX PS TO PDF SOFTWARE
PDFBOX PS TO PDF LICENSE

The “simplest” solution was to use Acrobat Pro. And over the holidays, I had some ideas about making the whole form-filling and evidence gathering process dramatically easier.Īll went well with this project until the “final step” – taking all the information and plugging it into the government forms. I work with undocumented people and other low to middle income individuals and families who are trying to survive our immigration system. All that is comfortably within the 80%Īlthough I’m never quite sure which of my jobs is my day job, my non-programming life is as an immigration attorney. It made life easy recently when I had to take the 1000+ page PDFs at various stages of the progress of the Senate’s S-744 Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation, and get them in a state, where I could track the changes, and maintain “authorship” of sections that started as amendments from individual senators, and eventually merged “seamlessly” and without attribution, into the body of the text.

I’ve used PDFBox for a number of years, mostly for text extraction. I am not associated with the Apache group, and I don’t know anything about its current status or future plans. And when it comes to XFA form filling, these holes are very deep. But there is very little other documentation, and not many examples.

PDFBOX PS TO PDF PDF

And because it does model the PDF spec, it is “self documenting” – if you can read the spec.

PDFBOX PS TO PDF SOFTWARE

It has a learning curve – because the software models the PDF architecture (rather than procedurally doing tasks with PDF) you have to understand a lot about PDF to make a small change. It does about 80% of the things you need to do with a PDF file, and for the other things, it gets you about 80% of the way there. I was very impressed by the quality of IText and would have signed up with them and not gone down this road if they had a “starter/incubator” licensing scheme. Even the IText 4.2 snapshot, with the earlier licensing scheme, didn’t work.

PDFBOX PS TO PDF LICENSE

It’s a pretty raw success, and I have no idea when how or if any of it will get back into the trunk, so I’ll be posting detailed notes and breadcrumbs for others who don’t live a double life, and want to become coding superheroes.Īnd the spoiler is that IText 5 (the one with the commercial license and/or the GNU Affero “community license”) was the only out-of-the-box solution that worked. I’m writing it after finally “succeeding” with the Apache PDFBox project. Also, you won’t learn much PDF by studying PDFBox, but the more you understand about PDF, the more you will understand the software. But if you want a solid starting point for your own PDFBox project, I hope you will find my comments helpful.

You need an out-of-the-box solution, and I recommend IText. I would be doing you a disservice by pretending that the Apache project is the way to go for a quickie. But if you read these posts with the expectation of a quick cut and paste solution, you will be disappointed. Part deux – quite soon I hope – will discuss the implementation. And we’ll also cover XFA, form filling in Acrobat, and IText. So this first post isn’t about the changes to PDFBox. I imagine that PDF toolkits have a very limited audience.

PDFBOX PS TO PDF MODS

This is an initial post about mods to PDFBox to allow XFA form filling on modern AES encrypted PDF forms, so that they still load into Acrobat Reader, and do not get the dreaded message informing you that the document has been modified and the Reader (form filling) extensions no longer work.

Pdfbox ps to pdf