How to fill PDF forms using Python

Question

I have a PDF form created using Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES 10.4. I need to fill it using Python so that we can reduce manual labor. I searched the web and read some article most of them were focused around pdfrw library, I tried using it and extracted some information from PDF form as shown below

Code

from pdfrw import PdfReader
pdf = PdfReader('sample.pdf')
print(pdf.keys())
print(pdf.Info)
print(pdf.Root.keys())
print('PDF has {} pages'.format(len(pdf.pages)))

Output

['/Root', '/Info', '/ID', '/Size']
{'/CreationDate': "(D:20180822164509+05'30')", '/Creator': '(Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES 10.4)', '/ModDate': "(D:20180822165611+05'30')", '/Producer': '(Adobe XML Form Module Library)'}
['/AcroForm', '/MarkInfo', '/Metadata', '/Names', '/NeedsRendering', '/Pages', '/Perms', '/StructTreeRoot', '/Type']
PDF has 1 pages

I am not sure how further I can use pdfrw to access the fillable fields from the PDF form and fill them using Python is it possible. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Answer 1

I wrote a library built upon:'pdfrw', 'pdf2image', 'Pillow', 'PyPDF2' called fillpdf (pip install fillpdf and poppler dependency conda install -c conda-forge poppler)

Basic usage:

from fillpdf import fillpdfs

fillpdfs.get_form_fields("blank.pdf")

# returns a dictionary of fields
# Set the returned dictionary values a save to a variable
# For radio boxes ('Off' = not filled, 'Yes' = filled)

data_dict = {
'Text2': 'Name',
'Text4': 'LastName',
'box': 'Yes',
}

fillpdfs.write_fillable_pdf('blank.pdf', 'new.pdf', data_dict)

# If you want it flattened:
fillpdfs.flatten_pdf('new.pdf', 'newflat.pdf')

More info here: https://github.com/t-houssian/fillpdf

If some fields don't fill, you can use fitz (pip install PyMuPDF) and PyPDF2 (pip install PyPDF2) like the following altering the points as needed:

import fitz
from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader

file_handle = fitz.open('blank.pdf')
pdf = PdfFileReader(open('blank.pdf','rb'))
box = pdf.getPage(0).mediaBox
w = box.getWidth()
h = box.getHeight()

# For images
image_rectangle = fitz.Rect((w/2)-200,h-255,(w/2)-100,h-118)
pages = pdf.getNumPages() - 1
last_page = file_handle[pages]
last_page._wrapContents()
last_page.insertImage(image_rectangle, filename=f'image.png')

# For text
last_page.insertText(fitz.Point((w/2)-247 , h-478), 'John Smith', fontsize=14, fontname="times-bold")
file_handle.save(f'newpdf.pdf')

Answer 2

You can find the form fields here:

pdf.Root.AcroForm.Fields

or here

pdf.Root.Pages.Kids[page_index].Annots

This is a PdfArray object. Basically a List. The Name of the field is found here:

pdf.Root.AcroForm.Fields[field_index].T

Other keys include the value .V There's a bunch of display information, like the font etc under .AP.N.Resources

However, if you update the value for a field and output the pdf file. It might only display the value when the field has focus i.e is clicked on.

I haven't figured out how to fix that yet.