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Comment by dazh | Hacker News Reader

Glad to see people building in the PDF space, which as a format is unfortunately both awful and ubiquitous. Are you planning to build any support for programmatically filling out existing PDF forms? That's a huge pain point our product is facing that doesn't seem easy to solve.

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I'm facing that same pain point of programmatic PDF filling. I noodled around in the PDF format and learned it's a bit difficult to deal with fonts and formatting. But I think this client-side library works well enough, as a start: https://pdf-lib.js.org/#fill-form

I've also heard of one paid API that I forgot but seemed to work well, and this related service https://www.jotform.com/, and I also considered porting some server-side libraries to WASM. One day I'll collect all the libraries and findings in a blog post.

Are you looking to programmatically fill any PDF form by detecting the fields? Or are you filling one known PDF template?

Years ago I needed to programmatically fill PDFs and used this library to achieve it. Funny it has the same name as what you linked: https://www.pdflib.com/

It is a paid commercial product however.

For programmatically filling, checkout https://platoforms.com. It even provides a API playground, https://www.platoforms.com/docs/advanced/api-playground/, super easy to test the API on your actual PDF form.

For programmatic filling of PDFs, have a look at DocSpring: https://docspring.com

Yes, our focus is on programmatic interactions with PDFs, form filling is on our roadmap, alongside programmatic digital signature and many more.

Amazing, is there anywhere I can follow along to find out when form filling will be available?

Sure! Feel free to join our Discord, we post announcements as soon as new features are released. You can also ask for features, we prioritise these requests with enterprise customer's in our development roadmap.

What are you looking for in programmatic pdf filling?

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