pdf - Save data as editable Pdf

Question

We have a software, which creates user reports and saves them into pdf documents. We're using Ghostscript for this.

I'm aware that PDF is "normally" an export format which is not editable, but one of our customer needs the possibility (for legal reasons) to edit these files.

I thought it can be possible to save the text in fillable forms (like adobe acrobat offers) and save it that way. Is it possible to create Text within a fillable form in a PDF and save it (with free tools like Ghostscript), so that the user can edit it later?

I read the Ghostscript documentation, but I didn't find anything.

Answer 1

GhostScript isn't really a terrific tool for this. You'd be better off with a PDF generation library which can add the appropriate annotations to the page - if you're wedded to using annotations.

If the "content" must be edited by end users, using widget annotations is not a horribly bad way of doing things, except that every end user needs to have a copy of Acrobat and if only some people are allowed to edit, you will likely have to play with owner password protection and permissions in order prevent anyone from changing field contents.

As for free tools, depending on the usage you could use iText or iTextSharp.

If you are required to be able to take the content of the document and be able to make changes to it on the fly, that's a trickier beast. If you can afford it (and it's certainly not free), my company Atalasoft, publishes a product that I wrote that lets you build PDF documents from scratch or from templates and embed the .NET objects that create the content into the PDF itself, which means that you can read those objects back out and change the content with a site-specific application, for example.