I have pdf file with XFA forms. I need to populate this pdf with data and send it to user. I am looking for a library will help me in that. This library needs to be:
- free, meaning that I can use it for free in the proprietary software,
- written in a language, which can be easily installed on a linux machine (java, python, ruby?)
I was already looking at iText, but its latest LGPL version is quite old and generates broken pdf in my case. What is strange, iTextSharp works for me, but I don't think that it will work on mono.
Reasonably priced paid solutions are also welcomed.
Related
I noticed that, unlike with when Adobe owned the PDF standards, ISO does not make the specifications free to anyone and everyone, but only to paid members. Now I assume that most major software application and plug-in developers would subscribe to ISO, or at least would for this specification, but I don't want to get burned.
We're creating an e-document, and the service that manages acquiring a digital signature said that the user/signor has to be able to open a PDF document created to PDF 2.0 specifications (released August 2017).
Is this an issue, or are all the usual suspects (Adobe Reader, Chrome Plug-ins, Firefox Plug-ins, android and iPhone browser apps) up to speed on this specification?
We're going to put a requirements message and link for free software downloads, so I want to make sure I'm not creating a problem with my "advice" based on assumptions.
Is this an issue, or are all the usual suspects (Adobe Reader, Chrome
Plug-ins, Firefox Plug-ins, android and iPhone browser apps) up to
speed on this specification?
Versioning in the PDF format is pretty loose, and regardless of the "version" of a particular PDF file, even old versions, it is always possible that a PDF will not "work" properly in any application. The PDF standard is massive, and incorporates a ton of other standards (various fonts, compression algorithms, etc.).
So the answer is, yes this could be an issue, but that is the case for any PDF with any PDF reader (Adobe is not perfect either).
digital signature said that the user/signor has to be able to open a
PDF document created to PDF 2.0 specifications (released August 2017).
I think what is more important for you is perhaps finding out more from your vendor about what exactly they are putting into their digital signatures that make them 2.0 specific. The 2.0 standard definitely improves on Digital Signatures and makes them more robust and reliable.
I suspect that your PDF will render/view fine in any decent PDF reader, but Digital Signature checking/validation would only work with PDF readers supporting 2.0. But most PDF readers ignore digital signatures anyway (since it is just metadata with no bearing on viewing).
Again, getting more info from your vendor would be the best next step. If you find out more you could update your question here.
We have some tools that generate PDF. We want to automate some testing to make sure the generated PDFs are tagged (PDF/UA) and that the tags are valid.
There are a lot of interactive checkers (acrobat, PDF Accessibility Checker (PAC), etc). They generate reports of things that pass/fail in the PDF based on the matterhorn protocol. I'd like to generate these similar reports but automated.
I recently found a perl module, PDF::API2, that might be promising but I only wrote a few simple tests with perl about 15 years ago. Has anyone used that module for tagged pdf checking or have you done this with a different scripting language?
The technology used in Adobe Acrobat (in its Preflight component) is developed by callas software (caution: I'm heavily affiliated with this company). callas also develops the same technology under the name pdfaPilot, which exists in a manual version but also in command-line and SDK versions that fully automate the process.
But!
As stated by Max Wyss in his comment on your question already, there are two parts to PDF/UA checking. Some of the specification's rules can be tested automatically by software, but a lot of them cannot.
To give one example, it is possible to verify programmatically that all text in a PDF document is tagged with a language. It's a whole other ballgame to check whether those language tags are actually correct.
pdfaPilot Desktop actually allows you to automatically check what is possible, and then allows you to convert the PDF/UA file into visually tagged HTML which makes it much easier to verify that meaning and structure of the text are correct.
In other words, yes, such technology exists, but it will never be 100% complete.
I need to read and edit existing pdf in win 8 app.
Editing pdf include adding text and images at any position on pdf.
Shall i go for xaml or javascript based coding.
which link should i follow that will give info for editing pdf.
Maybe this can help you : ....
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/wpf/thread/d115b1a4-bbcd-415d-81c4-fc167bf918f6/
PDF is a beast of a file format. If you don't have lots of software development experience (which your question suggests you do not), writing a PDF editor from the ground up (especially if you have no team) can be a daunting task, even only considering the non-UI aspects of it.
Even should you implement a library that's 100% conforming to standards, you'll have to deal with all the faulty PDFs out there. Which very few readers, including the Win8 PDF reader, accomplish.
In case you're looking for a library, you should have a look at http://www.dynaforms.com/ - it can cope with most PDFs and has some editing functions and a renderer (in the professional version) as well and there's a Windows 8 compatible version of it.
If you want ready framework, you can look at Foxit Software solutions. They already have framework for Win8, but it can be expensive.
Im currently writing my bachelor thesis with latex and using TexnicCenter. I want to be able to send my generated pdf file to people and they should be able to write comments.
It seems like commenting is not allowed by default, how do I change this?
I am using straight to PDF with pdflatex and acrobat reader 9 to read and comment on the files
I think your problem is that acrobat reader doesn't allow commenting on documents not produced by abode approved products, which I don't think pdflatex would be.
You should look at the free PDF-XChange Viewer which allows you to comment and annotate the text. Its a portable windows app (download), so doesn't need to be installed on your (or the reviewers) machines.
In order to comment using the free Adobe Reader application, the document needs to be signed with a cryptographic key only available from Adobe's commercial (non-free, for-pay) software suites. Likewise, if one is using Adobe Acrobat (not the free Reader) to view a PDF document, commenting may be activated -- or so I hear. The idea here is that it takes some piece of commercial Adobe software in the scenario -- be it producer or consumer -- to make commenting possible.
There are other free PDF producer and consumer applications that allow some form of annotation, but none of them are equivalent to the "native" form offered by Adobe's products.
Strange... I just finished my master thesis, using TexnicCenter and the MikTeX distribution, and comments worked just fine. What build profile do you use? Straight to PDF with pdflatex, or via the PS->PDF route? You might want to try the pdflatex method.
(EDIT): ah, we used Acrobat Pro for commenting, so that's why it did work in our case... Thanks rsg!
You can download the 30 day trial of Acrobat Professional 9, and enable the user rights required on the pdf so that they can comment using Acrobat Reader.
I would definitely have a look at the LaTeX Web Companion. There is a whole section about generating PDF from LaTeX, including esoterica such as forms.
We are developing a little application that given a directory with PDF files creates a unique PDF file containing all the PDF files in the directory. This is a simple task using iTextSharp. The problem appears if in the directory exist some files like Word documents, or Excel documents.
My question is, is there a way to convert word, excel documents into PDF programmatically? And even better, is this possible without having the office suite installed on the computer running the application?
Office 2007 allows for this. I have found PDFCreator to be good, the VBA is included in sample files, and have heard that CutePDF is also good. PDFCreator and CutePDF are free.
To work without Office, you would need viewers, as far as I know:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c8378bf4-996c-4569-b547-75edbd03aaf0&displaylang=EN
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=95E24C87-8732-48D5-8689-AB826E7B8FDF&displaylang=en
I needed to do this myself, but managed to get it done with .Net and without 3rd party tools:
MSDN: Saving Word 2007 Documents to PDF and XPS Formats
Pretty simple, about 50 lines of code. However I think you will need Word 2007 installed on the machine as well as the ability to Save As PDF
To convert Word documents to PDF, take a look at jWordConvert, a java library that can do exactly that. This will not work with the Excel files though, only with the Word files. The language is not Sharp, it's Java but you could switch to use IText (which is java) instead of ITextSharp.
You can also use a component like activePDF's DocConverter to convert a lot formats to PDF.
Use PDF maker that comes with adobe 7- 9
I just used this code Covert Doc to PDF
I'm surprised Aspose wasn't mentioned here, it's easy, simple, and reliable. Downside is that it is not free.
I've used iTextSharp in the past, it's really good, easy to install (one DLL I believe), the merge takes a bit of tindering so it's not as easy to use as Aspose, but hey, it's free so that is the best part.
TallPDF.NET (comes with a hefty price tag) allows you to serve dynamic PDF from any .NET application including ASP.NET pages and web services.
PDFEdit (free and open source) is an editor for manipulating PDF documents. It has a GUI version and a command-line interface. Scripting is used to a great extent in the editor and almost anything can be scripted. It is possible to create your own scripts or plugins.
The most common way to convert files to a pdf is to print them to a pdf printer driver. There are a number of such drivers, one that i know of that will do the job is Black Ice.
Another is to use Adobe Acrobat's SDK. from memory its very expensive.
Its been a while since i have actually done any work with converting pdf's and the landscape may have changed.