pdf-lib VS PyPDF4

I'm facing that same pain point of programmatic PDF filling. I noodled around in the PDF format and learned it's a bit difficult to deal with fonts and formatting. But I think this client-side library works well enough, as a start: https://pdf-lib.js.org/#:~:text=a%20single%20document.-,Fill...

I've also heard of one paid API that I forgot but seemed to work well, and this related service https://www.jotform.com/, and I also considered porting some server-side libraries to WASM. One day I'll collect all the libraries and findings in a blog post.

Are you looking to programmatically fill any PDF form by detecting the fields? Or are you filling one known PDF template?

Thanks! For PDF form filling, I use the APIs that pdf-lib [0] exposes. That includes text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns and options lists. Give it a try and let me know if you find a type of form field that's missing.

[0] https://github.com/Hopding/pdf-lib

I do not know if some plugin exists, but maybe you have to take a look at https://pdf-lib.js.org/

PDFmake or pdf-lib would be the way to go in my opinion.

Sure! You can build your own PDF editor with a combination of PDF.js and PDF-lib

I stand on the shoulders of giants, namely PDF-lib, PDF-js and React-beautiful-DND – everything else is pretty much custom code.

How one can use a library such as PDF-Lib (npm, website) that:

I built my side-project https://pdfvise.com/ using https://pdf-lib.js.org/ for pdf manipulations.

There's also a PyPDF4 ... https://github.com/claird/PyPDF4 ...

I looked through PyPDF4 (https://github.com/claird/PyPDF4) and tried to decode a pdf on osx but found that PyPDF4 supports decryption for algorithms 1 or 2 however OSX PDF encryption only writes encrypted pdfs with algorithm 4. So basically, I don't have a tool readily available to create a starting encrypted pdf that could be decrypted by PyPDF4.

I'm not a python expert, but I've heard good things about PyQT. You might want to check it out. You can then use PyPDF to read/write PDF files.

PyPDF2 - Python (there seems to be up to PyPDF4, now)

While there are numerous ways to handle PDF documents with Python, I find generating or editing HTML far easier and more reliable than trying to figure out the intricacies of the PDF format. Sure, there is the venerable ReportLab, and if HTML is not your cup of tea, I encourage you to look into that option. There is also PyPDF2. Or maybe PyPDF3? No, perhaps PyPDF4! Hmmm... see the problem? My best guess is PyPDF3, for what that is worth.