Filling PDF Forms with PHP

Question

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

This edited version of the question is hopefully a good candidte for reopen. It's been viewed >36K times and has interesting answers. — jah, Jun 14 '15 at 09:59
@jah: It's a library recommendation question, which by its very nature is off-topic. Even if it were to be reopened it'd simply be closed again with a more precise reason. — BoltClock, Jun 16 '15 at 06:09
@jah: Perhaps if you rephrase the question "In PHP, how can I fill PDF forms and then save (flatten) them to PDF files." Seems some people can't get past the word "library". — bmb, Mar 03 '16 at 22:46

score 50 · Accepted Answer · edited May 16 '16 at 18:45

50

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.

edited May 16 '16 at 18:45

Jeff Puckett

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answered Sep 16 '08 at 23:21

bmb

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A late +1 for you, sir. Searched, found this, solved my problem. – Damovisa Apr 30 '09 at 01:35
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UTF-16 issues that may arise with fdf files are addresses in a separate answer below. – Val Redchenko Oct 07 '12 at 19:24
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This is a cross-platform and cross-language solution but, since the question is tagged as PHP, I'll recommend [php-pdftk](https://github.com/mikehaertl/php-pdftk) to take care of the internals. My first tests have been impressive. – Álvaro González Aug 14 '15 at 12:32
Thanks Álvaro. Since this answer predates that project by about 6 years, it was unknown to me at the time. – bmb Aug 14 '15 at 15:05

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 07 '12 at 19:23

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

Very helpful, thank you! Such an amazing community. – Khom Nazid May 30 '18 at 18:00 — Khom Nazid, May 30 '18 at 18:00

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 17 '12 at 15:16

3

For:

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

Feel free to check my PdfFormFillerUTF-8.

edited Jun 17 '12 at 15:16

j0k

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answered May 20 '12 at 14:00

Nikolay

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score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 03 '09 at 09:30

3

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)

answered Jul 03 '09 at 09:30

score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 18 '08 at 00:49

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.

Dhek template editor can be useful to define areas where you want to write data over PDF, with a separate template you can load in PHP when merging data, to get bounds/coordinates: https://github.com/applicius/dhek . — cchantep, May 22 '14 at 11:25

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Sep 22 '08 at 00:55

1

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.

answered Sep 22 '08 at 00:55

Chris Dolan

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Awesome. Too bad i don't know how to use Perl in a PHP script ... – Mort 1305 Jun 07 '20 at 01:14

score 1 · Answer 7 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

1

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

edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

Community

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answered Sep 16 '08 at 22:28

pix0r

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Yes, I saw that response. However, I was wondering if there was some library specific for working with PDF forms, not just flat PDF documents. – mno Sep 17 '08 at 03:36

score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Sep 16 '08 at 22:29

1

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.

answered Sep 16 '08 at 22:29

foxxtrot

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Filling PDF Forms with PHP

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