Help programmatically add text to an existing PDF

Question

I need to write a program that displays a PDF which a third-party supplies. I need to insert text data in to the form before displaying it to the user. I do have the option to convert the PDF in to another format, but it has to look exactly like the original PDF. C++ is the preferred language of choice, but other languages can be investigated (e.g. C#). It need to work on a Windows desktop machine.

What libraries, tools, strategies, or other programming languages do you suggest investigate to accomplish this task? Are there any online examples you could direct me to.

Thank-you in advance.

Answer 1

What about PoDoFo:

The PoDoFo library is a free, portable C++ library which includes classes to parse PDF files and modify their contents into memory. The changes can be written back to disk easily. The parser can also be used to extract information from a PDF file (for example the parser could be used in a PDF viewer). Besides parsing PoDoFo includes also very simple classes to create your own PDF files. All classes are documented so it is easy to start writing your own application using PoDoFo.

Answer 2

Consider Python It have a lot PDF librarys (both creating and extracting) eg:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pdfsplit/0.4.2

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/JagPDF/1.4.0

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pdfminer/20091129

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/podofo/0.0.1

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyFPDF/1.52

There are also good tools for using C/C++ code in Python and to create .exe form Python scripts. If you decide to use different language consider Python as prototyping language!

Answer 3

Are there any tools or libraries that I can use in .Net, for a Windows desktop application?

Answer 4

iTextSharp is a free library that you can use in .Net applications. Take a look at the iText page - that is for the iText project, which is a Java library. iTextSharp is part of that project, and is a port to C# and .Net.