pdf-lib VS simplepdf-embed

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.

SimplePDF embed allows you do exactly that, unfortunately it does not support Vue yet (although PRs are welcome!)

As an alternative you may want to look into SimplePDF Embed.

If you can afford to pay a monthly fee, have a look at SimplePDF embed

If you want a preview of the pages, the ability to add some annotations and download, you may want to look into SimplePDF embed.

You can have a look at the code of the extension if interested, it’s open source: https://github.com/bendersej/simplepdf-embed/tree/main/chrome-extension

If that’s the case you may want to look into Simple PDF embed that allows you to open the PDF editor in any page using an iframe (a bit of JavaScript)

I built and published @simplepdf/react-embed-pdf last week