Filling PDF Forms with PHP

How to fill PDF form in php

Calling pdftk is a nice way to accomplish this. I'll assume that you know how to execute an external program and leave that out.

First, create an FDF file from your PDF.

pdftk form.pdf generate_fdf output data.fdf

You can now use that as template. The sample that you provided looks like this:

%FDF-1.2
%<E2><E3><CF><D3>
1 0 obj 
<<
/FDF 
<<
/Fields [
<<
/V ()
/T (Date)
>> 
<<
/V /
/T (CheckBox2)
>> 
<<
/V /
/T (CheckBox3)
>> 
<<
/V /
/T (CheckBox4)
>> 
<<
/V /
/T (CheckBox5)
>> 
<<
/V ()
/T (Your_Last_Name)
>> 
<<
/V ()
/T (Your_First_Name)
>> 
<<
/V /
/T (CheckBox1)
>>]
>>
>>
endobj 
trailer

<<
/Root 1 0 R
>>
%%EOF

The fields are lines that start with /V (). Enter your desired values into those fields. For example:

%FDF-1.2
%<E2><E3><CF><D3>
1 0 obj 
<<
/FDF 
<<
/Fields [
<<
/V (February 4, 2012)
/T (Date)
...

Finally, merge the FDF with the PDF. Execute the command:

pdftk form.pdf fill_form data.fdf output form_with_data.pdf

If you don't need to keep the FDF and generated PDF files, you can simply pipe the data via stdin and stdout instead of using temp files.

Filling PDF Forms with PHP

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.

Fill Pdf form using php laravel

Change ->flatten() to needAppearances().

Note: When filling in UTF-8 data, you should always add the needAppearances() option. This will make sure, that the PDF reader takes care of using the right fonts for rendering, something that pdftk can't do for you. Also note that flatten() doesn't really work well if you have special characters in your data.

https://github.com/mikehaertl/php-pdftk

Filling PDF form by PHP - PDFtk not working

First u have install pdftk on your server then run this following command

pdftk path/to/the/form.pdf dump_data_fields > field_names.txt

and you get txt file for your pdf file and it's output like this

FieldType: Text
FieldName: data[0].#pageSet[0].TimeSheet[0].KUNNR[0]
FieldNameAlt: User
FieldFlags: 1
FieldValueDefault: 65604
FieldJustification: Left
FieldMaxLength: 10
FieldJustification: Left
---

then u use following package for it

composer require mikehaertl/php-pdftk

then update composer

 use mikehaertl\pdftk\Pdf; 
// Fill form with data array
    $pdf = new Pdf('path of your pdf');
    $pdf->fillForm([
        'data[0].#pageSet[0].TimeSheet[0].KUNNR[0]'=>'sanjay',
    ])
        ->needAppearances()
        ->saveAs('filled.pdf');

it's work for me.

Fill pdf form image field with image

It is possible to carry an image via FDF however the aim of Forms Data is to carry simple text objects such as text field entries or other comments. So for an image it needs to be as separate annotation stamp and unsure if that can be attached to a field as such.

Here is a stamp added to the "clean" file ( note it is "under" the field entries)

%FDF-1.4
%âãÏÓ
1 0 obj
<<
/FDF <<
/Annots [2 0 R]
/F (clean.pdf)
/ID [<BBB71BA5F45E7149AAF360F13C5FB61A> <B7FE6051163F4F46B31241A24E573F8B>]
/UF (clean.pdf)
>>
/Type /Catalog
>>
endobj
2 0 obj
<<
/AP <<
/N 3 0 R
>>
/C [1 0 0]
/CreationDate (D:20220127132137Z)
/F 4
/IT /Stamp
/M (D:20220127132137Z)
/Name /image.08000006
/NM (1a68adc3-7c8a-45a2-b661dc794cc8ea96)
/Page 0
/Rect [0 399 412 792]
/Subj (Stamp)
/Subtype /Stamp
/T (K)
/Type /Annot
>>
endobj
3 0 obj
<<
/BBox [0 0 412 393]
/Filter /FlateDecode
/Length 34
/Resources <<
/XObject <<
/Im0 4 0 R
>>
>>
/Subtype /Form
/Type /XObject
>>
stream
xÚ+ä214R0...
                      ... continues lots of binary lines ...
(F8F8F1Â1ŠŽŽQ¾KþM

endstream
endobj
trailer
<<
/Root 1 0 R
>>
%%EOF

The image could be a signature and perhaps the stream be converted to a textual stream for simple text transfer or text templating without binary content.

---

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