Re: [chiPHPug-discuss] PDF Converter

[Richard L. <ce...@l-...>]

Realize that Adobe is in the business of making money from Acrobat,
the thing that lets you build PDFs and FDFs, and that it's proprietary
technology...

You're not going to find something FREE to do something with their
technology when that's one of their business models.

That said, there ARE free php extensions, for non-commercial use, to:
  Create PDF on the fly, from scratch.
  Create FDF on the fly, from scratch.

For commercial use, or if you need to suck in existing PDF and append
them, you'd need a commercial license for pdfLib.

I think there is a Microsoft free printer that will convert to an
image by "printing" the PDF to a file.  But that's hardly "editable"
as it's just a bitmap.

If you're looking for a cross between a <FORM> and a PDF, you want the
free FDFToolkit and the related php extension:
http://php.net/fdf
I wrote a how-to article about it in php|architect back in the day.
I have it online here:
http://phpbootcamp.com/articles/fdf.htm

That's a bit dated, but should still work, I think...

But anything that sucks in a generic PDF and then edits what is in the
PDF...

Especially because a PDF page could easily be an encrypted compress
image for the whole page, with no vector graphics at all.

Or the PDF itself could be locked, password-protected, or all kinds of
DRM-like stuff that Adobe and their customers apparently find useful.

Well, there *is* an online PDF editor thingie on adobe.com, which
might let you suck in an existing PDF and hack at it...

You could even use cURL to pound at it, I suppose...

But I doubt that would scale up well, and I'm sure it's against the
TOU to do that.

If you post more detail about what your big picture goal is, you may
get even more useful input.

On Tue, July 29, 2008 12:02 pm, Steven wrote:
> The simple act of converting a pdf file to something editable (like
> tif) seems to be quite the lucrative business. Thus far, I have been
> unable to find a free, no strings attached converter. They all happily
> neglect to mention that they aren't free, waiting until you've
> downloaded and installed the converter to smack you with watermarks on
> anything you try to output with them.
>
> Anyone know of a free converter? All I need to do is sign some forms.
> (No ink or paper at the moment, so I'm hand-drawing my sig in paint.)
>
>  ---------------
> ~Amaroq Wolf
>
>
>
>
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