PDF Form Field Manipulation

Question

I'm making a web interface to autofill pdf forms with user data from a database. The admin needs to be able to upload a pdf (right now targeted at IRS pdf forms) and then associate the fields in the pdf with data fields in the database.

I need a way to help the admin associate the field names (stuff like "topmostSubform[0].Page2[0].p2-t66[0]") with the the data fields in the database. I'm looking for a way to modify the PDF programatically to in some way provide this information.

Basically I'm open to suggestions on how I might make the field names appear in an obvious manner on a modified version of the original pdf. The closest I've gotten is being able to insert Tooltips into the fields in the pdf by just editting the raw pdf line by line. However when editting the pdf in this manner the field names are gibberish, and so I can't just use them.

An optimal solution would be anything that could automatically parse a pdf and set each field's tooltip to be the fields name. Anything that can be run from the command line, or any python tool, or just a basic how to correctly parse a field's name from a raw pdf file would be amazing.

Answer 1

There may be an easier solution than this, but you could definitely get the job done with ReportLab.

If you can save the current tax forms as an image, you could determine where each of the items need to be written and develop your code so that it automatically layers the appropriate values from the database on top of the image (the tax form, or whatever it might be).

Once you've determined 1) What fields need to be pulled from the database, and 2) where they 're supposed to go on within the form...

this is essentially what you'd be doing:

from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas 

report_string_values = ['Alex',500,500],['Guido',400,400],
c = canvas.Canvas('hello.pdf')
c.drawImage(background_image,x_pos,y_pos) # x_pos and w_pos are # pixels from bl origin
for rsv in report_string_values:  
    c.drawString(rsv.x_pos,rsv.,rsv.text) 
c.showPage()
c.save()

Answer 2

A good response using ReportLab and pyPDF can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1180115/add-text-to-existing-pdf-using-python