How to Edit or Write on Existing Pdf With Ruby

How to edit or write on existing PDF with Ruby?

you have to definitely check out Prawn gem, by which you can generate any custom pdf files. You can actually use prawn to write in text into existing pdfs by treating the existing PDF as a template for your new Prawn document.

For example:

filename = "#{Prawn::DATADIR}/pdfs/multipage_template.pdf"
Prawn::Document.generate("full_template.pdf", :template => filename) do
  text "THis content is written on the first page of the template", :align => :center
end

This will write text onto the first page of the old pdf.

See more here:
http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/manual.pdf

Edit existing pdf file metadata with ruby (Apply Password protection)

template was removed in version 0.13.0 because it was too buggy :

Support for templates was dropped in Prawn 0.13.0, disabled by default in 0.14.0, and extracted in 0.15.0.

This gem includes the extracted templates code, which is completely unsupported, but provides the old functionality that was in Prawn 0.12.0 for years.

source : https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn-templates

As he said, you can try to add the library to your current Prawn installation.

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Otherwise you can use pdftk with Open3 module (http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/) :

require 'open3'

file_name = 'hello_world_1.pdf' # input
file_name_output = 'hello_world_2.pdf' # output

usr = 'foo'
pwd = 'bar'

pdftek = './pdftk.exe' # tested on windows

Open3.popen3("#{pdftek} #{file_name} output #{file_name_output} owner_pw #{pwd} user_pw #{usr}") do |stdin,stdout,stderr|
    # ...
end

There is also a wrapper for ruby but I haven't test it yet : https://github.com/tcocca/active_pdftk

Add text to existing pdf using ruby

This solution worked well for me...

Prawn::Document.generate("output.pdf", :template => "/path/to/template.pdf") do
  text "This is a text in a copied pdf.", :align => :center
end

How to replace a word in an existing PDF using Ruby Prawn?

1) I'm a star wars fan and all, but damn.

2) Your "simple task" is not even remotely simple. It's not that hard to COVER the existing text... but REPLACING IT is another mater entirely. And forget reflowing existing text. All-but-impossible.

If covering it will suffice, then you need only draw a rectangle filled with the background color over your first string, then draw your second string on top of it. I'm not familiar with Prawn PDF, so I'll leave the implementation details as an Exercise For the Reader.

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