PDF has become one of the established standards for transmitting documents in a stable format. With the introduction of PDF Forms there is now an opportunity to create a PDF Template and then programatically fill in the data. The PDF Framework provides many mechanisms for programatically creating, editing and processing PDF's but our tool here is specifically for dealing with PDF's from the command line. Using our tool you can take a PDF Form and set fields to values from a single command. This enabled batch processing to take a PDF Form as a template, set fields, flatten the form and then save it as a new PDF file which can then be sent via email, printed, or uploaded somewhere.
PDFTOOL FIELDS
This command will render all the field elements from a PDF form, supplying the filename(s) which will be required to set them. In our example below we can see this PDF has 13 fields that we can later manipulate from the command line.
PDFTOOL FORM
This command allows PDF Fields to be replaced with data from the command line. In this example below we're going to set a number of fields from a template PDF Form. The basic syntax for field setting is "FieldName=FieldValue". In our example we're setting "Start Date" to 01/12/2018 for example. The output shows the substitution taking place. There are two flavours of the FORM command, FORM will leave the output file as a PDF Form whereas FFORM will flatten the form after field replacement into a PDF Document.
PDFTOOL MERGE
Sometimes its a requirement to merge several PDF files together and our tool has this function which can merge unto 64 PDF files into a single output file.
In our example we're adding TEMPLATE.PDF and OUTPUT.PDF into a new PDF named FINAL.PDF
PDFTOOL EXPORT
Our tool allows you to export data from a PDF Form either to the screen or into a CSV File (EXPORTCSV). The CSV Export appends to the output file allowing you to accumulate data from a series of PDF files in a batch scenario. This can be useful in processing completed PDF Form documents.
If your interested in processing PDF Forms from the command line then contact us and we'll set you up with an eval copy.
