I have a PDF form
created using Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES 10.4
. I need to fill it using Python
so that we can reduce manual labor. I searched the web and read some article most of them were focused around pdfrw
library, I tried using it and extracted some information from PDF form
as shown below
Code
from pdfrw import PdfReader
pdf = PdfReader('sample.pdf')
print(pdf.keys())
print(pdf.Info)
print(pdf.Root.keys())
print('PDF has {} pages'.format(len(pdf.pages)))
Output
['/Root', '/Info', '/ID', '/Size']
{'/CreationDate': "(D:20180822164509+05'30')", '/Creator': '(Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES 10.4)', '/ModDate': "(D:20180822165611+05'30')", '/Producer': '(Adobe XML Form Module Library)'}
['/AcroForm', '/MarkInfo', '/Metadata', '/Names', '/NeedsRendering', '/Pages', '/Perms', '/StructTreeRoot', '/Type']
PDF has 1 pages
I am not sure how further I can use pdfrw
to access the fillable fields from the PDF form and fill them using Python
is it possible. Any suggestions would be helpful.
You can find the form fields here:
pdf.Root.AcroForm.Fields
or here
pdf.Root.Pages.Kids[page_index].Annots
This is a PdfArray object. Basically a List. The Name of the field is found here:
pdf.Root.AcroForm.Fields[field_index].T
Other keys include the value .V There's a bunch of display information, like the font etc under .AP.N.Resources
However, if you update the value for a field and output the pdf file. It might only display the value when the field has focus i.e is clicked on.
I haven't figured out how to fix that yet.
Use this to fill every fields if they are indexed.
template = PdfReader('template.pdf')
page_c = 0
while page_c < len(template.Root.Pages.Kids): #LOOP through pages
annot_c = 0
while annot_c < len(template.Root.Pages.Kids[page_c].Annots): #LOOP through fields
template.Root.Pages.Kids[page_c].Annots[annot_c].update(PdfDict(V=str(annot_c)+'-'+str(page_c)))
annot_c=annot_c+1
page_c=page_c+1
PdfWriter().write('output.pdf', template)
I wrote a library built upon:'pdfrw', 'pdf2image', 'Pillow', 'PyPDF2' called fillpdf (pip install fillpdf
and poppler dependency conda install -c conda-forge poppler
)
Basic usage:
from fillpdf import fillpdfs
fillpdfs.get_form_fields("blank.pdf")
# returns a dictionary of fields
# Set the returned dictionary values a save to a variable
# For radio boxes ('Off' = not filled, 'Yes' = filled)
data_dict = {
'Text2': 'Name',
'Text4': 'LastName',
'box': 'Yes',
}
fillpdfs.write_fillable_pdf('blank.pdf', 'new.pdf', data_dict)
# If you want it flattened:
fillpdfs.flatten_pdf('new.pdf', 'newflat.pdf')
More info here: https://github.com/t-houssian/fillpdf
If some fields don't fill, you can use fitz (pip install PyMuPDF
) and PyPDF2 (pip install PyPDF2
) like the following altering the points as needed:
import fitz
from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader
file_handle = fitz.open('blank.pdf')
pdf = PdfFileReader(open('blank.pdf','rb'))
box = pdf.getPage(0).mediaBox
w = box.getWidth()
h = box.getHeight()
# For images
image_rectangle = fitz.Rect((w/2)-200,h-255,(w/2)-100,h-118)
pages = pdf.getNumPages() - 1
last_page = file_handle[pages]
last_page._wrapContents()
last_page.insertImage(image_rectangle, filename=f'image.png')
# For text
last_page.insertText(fitz.Point((w/2)-247 , h-478), 'John Smith', fontsize=14, fontname="times-bold")
file_handle.save(f'newpdf.pdf')
AcroForm based Forms using PDFix SDK
def SetFormFieldValue(email, key, open_path, save_path):
pdfix = GetPdfix()
if pdfix is None:
raise Exception('Pdfix Initialization fail')
if not pdfix.Authorize(pdfix_email, pdfix_license):
raise Exception('Authorization fail : ' + pdfix.GetError())
doc = pdfix.OpenDoc(open_path, "")
if doc is None:
raise Exception('Unable to open pdf : ' + pdfix.GetError())
field = doc.GetFormFieldByName("Text1")
if field is not None:
value = field.GetValue()
value = "New Value"
field.SetValue(value)
if not doc.Save(save_path, kSaveFull):
raise Exception(pdfix.GetError())
doc.Close()
pdfix.Destroy()
A full solution was provided here: How to edit editable pdf using the pdfrw library?
The key part is the:
template_pdf.Root.AcroForm.update(pdfrw.PdfDict(NeedAppearances=pdfrw.PdfObject('true')))