PDF Manipulation was Design Question

[doc hawk]

*IF* the pdf files are simple enough, there are some substitutions that you can “just make”.

A string literal can be replaced with a string of the same length.  It could also be replaced with a shorter string and space-padded for the extra space.

You want to put a string that is three characters longer, as I understand.   *IF* there are three characters of white space or comment before the linefeed preceding the next “real” data, you could also substitute.

Encryption would obviously stop this.

Also, it’s common in some autogenerated forms to find things like “T e x t” instead of “Text”, or even spacing information between characters.


When my ambition comes back, I’m working on livecode to “layer” pdfs for form filling.   I just have to get the hang of the spacing.

It seems that a pdf can be included as an object in another pdf.

If the pdf widget could actually, well, output a pdf, rather than a screen-density image of it, my life would be *so* much easier and I could sell this thing I’ve put together over a decade tomorrow . . .

Or look at the source code of PyPDF2 (it’s BSD/Free licensing, not GPL, so you don’t get contaminated), which has all kinds of pdf manipulation stuff (I’ll leave it to others to comment on the effects on your health of reading that much python . . .