Get list of text-fields within PDF using PHP

Question

I have tried googleing this but can't seem to find an answer.

I have a client that has hundreds of PDF files, each of them have a form with any number of text-fields within them... it could range anywhere from 2 text-fields to 30 text-fields... that is an unknown.

What I need to do is read the PDF file, find all of the text-fields (including field names) within the PDF file so that I can dynamically generate a HTML form that an user will complete which then populates the PDF form.

How can I get a list of text fields and their names within a PDF document using PHP?

mario · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-05 00:21:00Z

1

There are few tools to work on PDFs that are natively written in PHP.

You might however be able to run the pdftk binary to accomplish this task:

$fields = `pdftk input.pdf dump_data_fields`;

Not tried since I don't have a PDF with forms handy. But supposely you get a textual result list as described here: http://www.cs.unb.ca/~bremner/blog/posts/filling_in_forms_with_pdftk/

answered Feb 5, 2011 at 0:21

mario

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