Apache PDFBox VS pdf-lib

Are you looking for a way to render PDF's or produce them? If you want to produce PDF's, I've used https://pdfbox.apache.org/ successfully as well as https://itextpdf.com/ (potentially costs money).

If you don't mind using java, you can use the open source Apache PDFBox library

https://pdfbox.apache.org/

It's relatively performant and it's a mature and supported codebase that can accomplish most pdf tasks.

Then, open the pdf_utils/pom.xml file and add a dependency to PDFBox, in the dependencies section:

There are some libraries for Java that can help you create a PDF file such as PDFBox or IText. Here there's a short exaplanation on how to use them.

So, when I started to view the documents, a lot of them simply failed to open. I had to look around for a library that could verify PDF documents. I had some experience with PDFBox in the past, so it seemed to be a good go-to solution. It had no way to verify documents by default, but it could open and parse them and that was enough to filter out the incorrect ones. It felt a little bit strange just to read the whole PDF into the memory to verify if it is correct or not, but hey I needed a simple fix for now and it worked really well.

PDFBox can do this. It’s not part of the CLI but it wouldn’t be too hard to add:

https://github.com/apache/pdfbox/blob/5b00807463279f1002e245...

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.