Skip to content

ruby wrapper for the pdftk command line utility for working with editable pdf files

License

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

CareerPlug/active_pdftk

 
 

Repository files navigation

ActivePdftk

This gem is intended to be a wrapper for the PDFTK command line utility for working with pdfs, mainly editable pdfs.

Currently this gem is intended to make the following much easier with pdftk:

1. Perform all operations provided by PDFTK (burst, cat, ....).
2. Making pdf forms reading & filling easy.
3. Get all the form fields details (type, readonly, ...) in a structured way to use them within other frameworks (such as Rails).
4. More to come through specifics adapters...

Official Repository : github.com/tcocca/active_pdftk

Library references : rubydoc.info/gems/active_pdftk

Issue tracker : github.com/tcocca/active_pdftk/issues

Installation

You must have PDFTK binary installed :

github.com/tcocca/active_pdftk/wiki/Install-pdftk

Or directly :

www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit

Then install the gem (note this is just in prep - the gem has not be released yet, soon I promise!)

gem install active_pdftk

or with Bundler :

gem 'active_pdftk'

or in a old rails 2.3.x app

config.gem 'active_pdftk'

Usage

PDFTK provides all kind of operations (See below for a full list). Depending of your needs you will use different Adapters.

For form handling use ActivePdftk::Form :

bic = ActivePdftk::Form.new('bic.pdf')
bic.set('first_field', 'SomeString') #=> 'SomeString'
bic.save #=> StringIO
bic.save('/path/to/filled.pdf') #=> '/path/to/filled.pdf'

it is quite straightforward !

For read/write metadata on a pdf file use ActivePdftk::Metadata (coming soon).

for other needs you will use ActivePdftk::Wrapper to access all operations of PDFTK.

if you want to dig deeper check ActivePdftk::Call which build the command line from an options hash.

ActivePdftk::Wrapper

This is the class you will interact with for all operations. The class will discover your ‘pdftk’ library (works on all *nix systems), but you can optionally give a path to the binary :

@pdftk = ActivePdftk::Wrapper.new
@pdftk.path # => 'etc/bin/pdftk'

OR

@pdftk = ActivePdftk::Wrapper.new(:path => '/usr/local/bin/pdftk')
@pdftk.path # => '/usr/local/bin/pdftk'

Then all operations are available :

@pdftk.cat([{:pdf => 'a.pdf', :pass => 'foo'}, {:pdf => 'b.pdf', :start => 1, :end => 'end', :orientation => 'N', :pages => 'even'}])
@pdftk.burst('in1.pdf')
@pdftk.dump_data_fields('~/Desktop/a.pdf', :output => '~/Desktop/data_fields.txt')
...

Other operations are :

cat (partially supported)
shuffle (partially supported)
burst (fully supported)
generate_fdf (fully supported) (this operation doesn't always provide readable FDF, we support this feature by our means)
fill_form (fully supported)
background (fully supported)
multibackground (fully supported)
stamp (fully supported)
multistamp (fully supported)
dump_data (fully supported)
dump_data_utf8 (fully supported)
dump_data_fields (fully supported)
dump_data_fields_utf8 (fully supported)
update_info (fully supported)
update_info_utf8 (fully supported)
attach_files (partially supported)
unpack_files (fully supported)

The Domain Specific Language

All operations & options are available through a hash corresponding to a DSL. A full explanation of this DSL could be read in ActivePdftk::Call reference.

#TODO write a more explicit, but concise paragraph.

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

  • Fork the project.

  • Make your feature addition or bug fix.

  • Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.

  • Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)

  • Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Copyright © 2011 Tom Cocca. See LICENSE for details.

Contributors

Marco ( github.com/elmatou ) - Thanks for contributing so much to the re-write of this gem and for adding most of the support for other methods in the Call class.

Props

Props to this gem go out to: jkraemer (Jens Krämer) for creating github.com/jkraemer/pdf-forms and devfu (Dev Fu!) for creating github.com/devfu/pdftk.

This gem was originally based on the work of those two projects and greatly expands upon their functionality.

About

ruby wrapper for the pdftk command line utility for working with editable pdf files

Resources

License

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Packages

No packages published

Languages

  • Ruby 100.0%