PDF Ravager

Provides a simple DSL for easily filling out AcroForms PDF or XFA documents.

Description

This library uses a combination of a simple DSL and a minimal façade over the last free version of the iText library to aid in filling out AcroForms PDF or XFA documents.

Synopsis

require 'pdf_ravager/kernel'

data = {name: 'Bob', gender: 'm', relation: 'Uncle' }

template = pdf do |p|
  p.text      'name', data[:name]
  p.rich_text 'name_stylized', "<b>#{data[:name]}</b>"
  p.radio_group 'sex' do |rg|
    rg.fill 'male'   if data[:gender] == 'm'
    rg.fill 'female' if data[:gender] == 'f'
  end
  p.check 'related' if data[:relation]
  p.checkbox_group 'relation' do |cg|
    case data[:relation]
    when 'Mom', 'Dad'
      cg.check 'parent'
    when 'Brother', 'Sister'
      cg.check 'sibling'
    else
      cg.check 'other'
    end
  end
end

template.ravage '/tmp/info.pdf', out_file: '/tmp/info_filled.pdf'
# if you'd like the populated form to be read-only:
template.ravage '/tmp/info.pdf', out_file: '/tmp/info_filled.pdf', read_only: true

If you don't want the global pdf method, the default require 'pdf_ravager' actually doesn't add it. You just need to be more wordy in this case:

require 'pdf_ravager'

data = {name: 'Bob', gender: 'm', relation: 'Uncle' }

template = PDFRavager::Template.new do |p|
  p.text 'name', data[:name]
  # ...
end

Usage

Field Names

To query and modify a form's field names, use a tool such as Adobe LiveCycle.

Rich Text

Rich text is specific to XFA forms. To understand how it should be used, see the "Rich Text Reference" section of Adobe's XFA standard. Rich Text is defined there as a subset of XHTML and CSS which uses some custom restrictions and extensions by Adobe. The minimum XHTML and CSS elements that a standards-compliant XFA processor (e.g. Adobe Reader) must support are also listed there and can be used as a guide.

Note: Rich text values are not HTML-escaped or sanitized in any way. It is suggested that you call CGI.escape_html on user-supplied input.

Checkbox Groups

Because there is no such thing as a "checkbox group," the checkbox_group syntax is simply syntactic sugar for calling check with the group name and a . prepended to the name. For example,

pdf do |p|
  p.checkbox_group 'relation' do |cg|
    cg.check 'parent'
  end
end

is equivalent to

pdf do |p|
  p.check 'relation.parent'
end

Copyright

The version of iText vendored is licensed under the LGPL.