Create/alter a PDF

[Garfield]

Hi,

I'm having alitte trouble finding the right solution to my problem, so hopefully you can help me out.

I want to change some content in a PDF file with PHP. The way I tried was generating a LaTeX document and changing the text in there, before converting it to PDF, but since I need a specific layout including textboxes and stuff, I dont think LaTeX can handle that.

Another way would be generating the PDF directly with FPDF or PHPLib inPHP, but I think there will be a similar problem concerning the layout.

Do you have any ideas or advice?

Thanks in advance!

[httpwebwitch]

altering a preexisting PDF file is a big headache. I did some experiments with that a long time ago, and gave up.

It's easiest to recreating the PDF again from scratch, using PDFlib or FPDF. Making complex layouts is tricky, but almost anything can be done with the PDFlib tools if you spend enough time at it.

Good luck!

[httpwebwitch]

OK, now I'm looking for a way to do the same thing - open a *pre-existing* PDF file and just smack some text down on it.

Does anyone know if it can be done?

[lazydog]

There was a open-source tool call pdf2txt. I dont exactly remember where I got it from; its been over a year. Try googling for "pdf2txt"

Saurabh.