Form Filling

[Noofbiz]

Hello,

I'm wondering if there's functionality for filling out a form. Take a template pdf with empty form spots and use a struct or map[string]string to add data to generate a new pdf filled with the data.

FPDF has a script able to do that here: https://github.com/madnh/FPDM/tree/master/src

If the functionality isn't present, I'd be happy to give it a try.

Thanks

[jung-kurt]

Thanks for your interest, @Noofbiz. This topic was raised in issue 91. There appear to be some subtleties with the FPDM module that may make it a less-than-straightforward port. For example, I am not sure if the reference to the pdftk standalone application is a dependence or if it is used as a fallback.

If you want to tackle it (and I hope you do!), here are some guidelines:

• if there is any dependence other than the Go standard library, plan on placing the code in its own directory beneath contrib, otherwise, put it in its own file rather than in fpdf.go
• porting is generally simpler if you can massage the source into code that looks as much like Go as possible, but can still be tested as PHP; then, the final step from PHP to Go will be much easier

[Noofbiz]

I would like to take this issue on. I'd also like to see if the pdftk is a dependence, because that's what I'm actually doing now as a workaround lol. I'll fork and get started when I have time today.

Thanks!

[jung-kurt]

Thanks, @Noofbiz -- this will be a valuable feature!

[Noofbiz]

Sorry about being so behind on this. So, I'll need to add functionality to read pdf files for this to work natively. I'm thinking about adding a Load function yay will load the pdf at the given file path and then convert the pdf document into an Fpdf structure by the pdf syntax. Another way of doing it, if you believe that would be outside the scope of this project, would be for me to make a separate library to do the pdf reading. A third option would be to just use pdftk, which is what the php script does. It'll mean pdftk will be a dependency on the OS it's run on and will call it through os.exec,so it'll also have to be on the $PATH.

I vote for the first option if you don't object.

[Javivi]

Hello @Noofbiz @jung-kurt !

Did anything come out of this 👍 ?

[Noofbiz]

Pdftk was a dependence and it calls that via the command line. I started looking at the spec for pdf and tried to make a parser myself but that never really went anywhere. I can see if I still have the code for that somewhere but all I don't think I got very far

[Noofbiz]

I just pushed the changes to my branch here https://github.com/Noofbiz/gofpdf there's a lot of work to do still and it's nowhere near updated to the recent gofpdf, so sorry about that :P