Filling PDF Forms with PHP [closed]

Question

Are there PHP libraries which can be used to fill PDF forms and then save (flatten) them to PDF files?

Answer 1

The libraries and frameworks mentioned here are good, but if all you want to do is fill in a form and flatten it, I recommend the command line tool called pdftk (PDF Toolkit).

See https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

You can call the command line from php, and the command is

pdftk formfile.pdf fill_form fieldinfo.fdf output outputfile.pdf flatten

You will need to find the format of an FDF file in order to generate the info to fill in the fields. Here's a good link for that:

http://www.tgreer.com/fdfServe.html

[Edit: The above link seems to be out of commission. Here is some more info...]

The pdftk command can generate an FDF file from a PDF form file. You can then use the generated FDF file as a sample. The form fields are the portion of the FDF file that looks like

...
<< /T(f1-1) /V(text of field) >>
<< /T(f1-2) /V(text of another field) >>
...

You might also check out php-pdftk, which is a library specific to PHP. I have not used it, but commenter Álvaro (below) recommends it.

Answer 2

A big +1 to the accepted answer, and a little tip if you run into encoding issues with the fdf file. If you generate the fields.fdf and upon running

file -bi fields.fdf

you get

application/octet-stream; charset=binary

then you've most likely run into a UTF-16 character set issue. Try converting the ftf by means of

cat fields.fdf | sed -e's/\x00//g' | sed -e's/\xFE\xFF//g' > better.fdf

I was then able to edit and import the better.fdf file into my PDF form.

Hopefully this saves someone some Google-ing

Answer 3

I've had plenty of success with using a form that submits to a php script that uses fpdf and passes in the form fields as get variables (maybe not a great best-practice, but it works).

 <?php
require('fpdf.php');
$pdf=new PDF();
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->SetY(30);
$pdf->SetX(100);
$pdf->MultiCell(10,4,$_POST['content'],0,'J');
$pdf->Output();
?>

and the you could have something like this.

  <form action="fooPDF.php" method="post">
     <p>PDF CONTENT: <textarea name="content" ></textarea></p>
     <p><input type="submit" /></p>
    </form>

This skeletal example ought to help ya get started.

Answer 4

generating fdf File with php: see http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.fdf.php

then fill it into a pdf with pdftk (see above)

Answer 5

For:

• Easier input format then XFDF
• True UTF-8 (Russian) support
• Complete php usage example

Feel free to check my PdfFormFillerUTF-8.

Answer 6

Looks like this has been covered before. Click through for relevant code using Zend Framework PDF library.

Answer 7

We use PDFLib at work. The paid version isn't very expensive, and there is a more limited open source edition, if you are unable to shell out for the paid version.

Answer 8

I wrote a Perl library, CAM::PDF, with a command-line interface that can solve this. I tried using an FDF solution years ago, but found it way too complicated which is why I wrote CAM::PDF in the first place. My library uses a few heuristics to replace the form with the desired text, so it's not perfect. But it works most of the time, and it's fast, free and quite straightforward to use.