Member Avatar for lewashby

At my current job me and the rest of the staff that work in my area are uisng a lot of files that when opened look like PDF files but there not. They're actually .exe files and the the program that opens them is called Omni Form Mailable Filler. I've already touched base with that company and they don't support that program anymore. When we use the files we are always having to fill in a lot of the same information over and over through 6 or more files. I'd like to be able to write a small simple GUI program that would allow us to enter all relevant informationg once and have the program create all the needed forms. So I have two objectives.
1: I need to be able to create PDF files taht look like the Omni Form files. So what I need is a recomendation on a good program for PDF file creation, preferably on Linux.
2: A recomendaiton on a good python library for writting to and filling in info on PDF files.

Thanks for any and all replies.

  • 5 Contributors
  • 6 Replies
  • 468 Views
  • 1 Week Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Gribouillis
Member Avatar for David W

Did you google for pdf file format?

But ... since the software you were using is NOT supported any longer ...
why not write your own data input forms?

Edited by David W
Member Avatar for Gribouillis

From my experience, it is usually easier to create pdf from another format, such as latex or rst or doconce or whatever. I never created a pdf file with forms because this seems to be very specific to adobe software.

Apparently, there is a way to create pdf forms with pdflatex by using a latex package named hyperref. Here is a tutorial Click Here. If it works, you could create a template for python (with mako or ninja ...) which would output a latex file with the forms filled, then process this through pdflatex.

Edited by Gribouillis
Member Avatar for woooee

Same here. I usually write it in Postscript and convert it, or when it is simple, do it in LibreOffice and save the file as a PDF.

Member Avatar for Gribouillis

Note that libreoffice can also convert files from the command line using a syntax such as

soffice --headless -env:UserInstallation="file:///home/user/.libreoffice-alt" --convert-to pdf[:filter] --outdir "/tmp" myfile.odt

Edit: different filter parameter are possible, such as writer8 for example.

Edited by Gribouillis
Member Avatar for Gribouillis

I discovered by ixquick(ing) that LibreOffice can create pdf forms too. It seems quite plausible to me that python can be used to fill the forms by altering the opendocument file.

Edit: from what I read elsewhere, some html to pdf converters such as wkhtmltopdf (install with apt-get) can also be used to convert html forms to pdf forms. It means that you could perhaps write your files in html (and style them with css).

Edited by Gribouillis
Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.