I’m really starting to hate Adobe and PDFs in general. Hopefully somewhere out there of my faithful few can point me in the right direction.
What I need to do is take data input from a web form or database and incorporate that into an already existing PDF, and then send the resulting PDF back to the user, through a unix based system (linux+apache).
This is for filling in forms and whatnot and the only gotcha is that the resulting PDF has to be downloadable by the user. I understand that the FDF data format is what I should be looking at, but as I understand it the output can only be viewed online.
The Adobe pages are less than helpful and while they have nice dowloadable SDKs, they all appear to be java based. There is a surprisingly little amount of information on google or CPAN about all this. I know that PHP has some functions for this but again, I’m looking for something really simple and braindead.
What I’m asking for can’t be that hard can it?
Update Thanks for the replies folks. However I have to reiterate… I’m not trying to convert something to or from PDF, I’m trying to insert form field data into an existing PDF and then having that available for download as a PDF. IE: [User Data] + [PDF with Form Fields] = [PDF] 🙂 The [PDF with Form Fields] is something that the company I’m working with will supply, and I do not plan on taking the weeks/months required to turn them from PDFs to Perl code with something like PDFLib (Shaggy, that was the first thing I thought of when I got this project, and quickly realized that it wouldn’t work). Though the PDI might work. I don’t care about if this is a pay-for library (not my money) as long as there’s a demo of some sort available so that I can try it out!