FPDI free parser that supports PDF version higher than 1.4

Question

Is there a free/open-source PDF parser out there that can do the job? The free parser that comes with FPDI only supports PDF version up to 1.4. I tried TCPDF but it didn't work.

I know I can change the PDF version of a PDF file thru Acrobat but I had experienced bug on doing this.

I am using FPDI to watermark PDFs we're selling on our company. I noticed one of the PDF I downgraded to 1.4 from 1.7 thru Acrobat looks pretty much the same but after my watermark function is done, the PDF will have white spaces on the right and bottom part of my cover page which has a black background. In short, the PDF looked bad to sell after the whole process.

Answer 1

I hit this same limitation in a project I'm currently working on, and ended up creating my own parser based on TCPDF's parser which works with a modified verision of FPDI called TCPDI and an unmodified copy of FPDF_TPL. It works with TCPDF 6, and supports up to at least PDF 1.6 (I haven't got a 1.7 PDF handy to try, but I'll be hunting one down shortly to make sure it works).

If you're still wanting to do this, please feel free to try out TCPDI / tcpdi_parser - if you encounter any issues, please report them via Github and I'll look into them. Basic installation and usage instructions can be found in the TCPDI README.