pdf-lib VS docx

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.

Since I don't have much knowledge of web development, the application has a very basic structure: html + css + javascript. To generate the document, I use a library called docx.js (https://docx.js.org). When the user clicks to submit the form, the request is passed to a function in the main file (app.js), which , through conditional logic, assembles the document using docx.js.

Looks like this library wasn't meant to open existing files: https://github.com/dolanmiu/docx/issues/1513

Had such requirement in the past, this worked well https://docx.js.org/

Honestly with this brief I'd avoid Ruby/Python and go straight with JavaScript. UIs with javascript are pretty easy, and there are great libraries out there like https://github.com/dolanmiu/docx which make it relatively easy to edit word documents.

For Excel it's much easier to convert your raw data to CSV than to put it into an HTML document and then extract it back out again. Similarly for .docx format, you're probably better off using a package like docx and building the document in a way more suited to the file format than trying to smush HTML into a new format.