yusdirman / active_pdftk

ruby wrapper for the pdftk command line utility for working with editable pdf files

ActivePdftk¶ ↑

This gem is intended to be a wrapper for the PDFTK command line utility for working with pdfs, mainly editable pdfs.

Currently this gem is intended to make the following much easier with pdftk:

1. Perform all operations provided by PDFTK (burst, cat, ....).
2. Making pdf forms reading & filling easy.
3. Get all the form fields details (type, readonly, ...) in a structured way to use them within other frameworks (such as Rails).
4. More to come through specifics adapters...

Official Repository : github.com/tcocca/active_pdftk

Library references : rubydoc.info/gems/active_pdftk

Issue tracker : github.com/tcocca/active_pdftk/issues

Installation¶ ↑

You must have PDFTK binary installed :

github.com/tcocca/active_pdftk/wiki/Install-pdftk

Or directly :

www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit

Then install the gem (note this is just in prep - the gem has not be released yet, soon I promise!)

gem install active_pdftk

or with Bundler :

gem 'active_pdftk'

or in a old rails 2.3.x app

config.gem 'active_pdftk'

Usage¶ ↑

PDFTK provides all kind of operations (See below for a full list). Depending of your needs you will use different Adapters.

For form handling use ActivePdftk::Form :

bic = ActivePdftk::Form.new('bic.pdf')
bic.set('first_field', 'SomeString') #=> 'SomeString'
bic.save #=> StringIO
bic.save('/path/to/filled.pdf') #=> '/path/to/filled.pdf'

it is quite straightforward !

For read/write metadata on a pdf file use ActivePdftk::Metadata (coming soon).

for other needs you will use ActivePdftk::Wrapper to access all operations of PDFTK.

if you want to dig deeper check ActivePdftk::Call which build the command line from an options hash.

ActivePdftk::Wrapper¶ ↑

This is the class you will interact with for all operations. The class will discover your ‘pdftk’ library (works on all *nix systems), but you can optionally give a path to the binary :

@pdftk = ActivePdftk::Wrapper.new
@pdftk.path # => 'etc/bin/pdftk'

OR

@pdftk = ActivePdftk::Wrapper.new(:path => '/usr/local/bin/pdftk')
@pdftk.path # => '/usr/local/bin/pdftk'

Then all operations are available :

@pdftk.cat([{:pdf => 'a.pdf', :pass => 'foo'}, {:pdf => 'b.pdf', :start => 1, :end => 'end', :orientation => 'N', :pages => 'even'}])
@pdftk.burst('in1.pdf')
@pdftk.dump_data_fields('~/Desktop/a.pdf', :output => '~/Desktop/data_fields.txt')
...

Other operations are :

cat (partially supported)
shuffle (partially supported)
burst (fully supported)
generate_fdf (fully supported) (this operation doesn't always provide readable FDF, we support this feature by our means)
fill_form (fully supported)
background (fully supported)
multibackground (fully supported)
stamp (fully supported)
multistamp (fully supported)
dump_data (fully supported)
dump_data_utf8 (fully supported)
dump_data_fields (fully supported)
dump_data_fields_utf8 (fully supported)
update_info (fully supported)
update_info_utf8 (fully supported)
attach_files (partially supported)
unpack_files (fully supported)

The Domain Specific Language¶ ↑

All operations & options are available through a hash corresponding to a DSL. A full explanation of this DSL could be read in ActivePdftk::Call reference.

#TODO write a more explicit, but concise paragraph.

Note on Patches/Pull Requests¶ ↑

• Fork the project.

• Make your feature addition or bug fix.

• Add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.

• Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history. (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)

• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Copyright¶ ↑

Copyright © 2011 Tom Cocca. See LICENSE for details.

Contributors¶ ↑

Marco ( github.com/elmatou ) - Thanks for contributing so much to the re-write of this gem and for adding most of the support for other methods in the Call class.

Props¶ ↑

Props to this gem go out to: jkraemer (Jens Krämer) for creating github.com/jkraemer/pdf-forms and devfu (Dev Fu!) for creating github.com/devfu/pdftk.

This gem was originally based on the work of those two projects and greatly expands upon their functionality.