Reading PDF Form Data in LiveCode?

[Bob Sneidar]

Have you heard of my app? :-)

What I do on a Mac is tell Acrobat (via Applescript) to create an fdf file which is an xml formatted file of all the values in the form controls. I then have a function that parses that file into a livecode array. Windows is trickier, because you cannot tell acrobat for windows to do anything from outisde without going through a C API that Adobe provides for that purpose. 

If however your workflow allows for a user interaction, then you can just create an action to run a javascript. Here's the code:

this.exportAsFDF(true, true, null, false);

Once you have that file, I can send you the code I use to parse it. 

Bob S


> On Oct 10, 2018, at 08:03 , Stephen Barncard via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> before wheel invention it might be prudent to see how the existing apps do
> this.
> especially if this is a one shot.
> 
> https://pdf.wondershare.com/top-pdf-software/free-pdf-to-csv-converter.html
> --
> Stephen Barncard - Sebastopol Ca. USA -
> mixstream.org
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 7:45 AM Peter Reid via use-livecode <
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
>> Does anyone have any code or suggestions for reading the data from PDF
>> forms? I have several hundred form fields in 5 different design forms in
>> PDF format that I need to extract. The data is mainly text fields but may
>> include a few checkboxes and radio buttons. Any thoughts please?
>> 
>> Thanks
>> 
>> Peter
>> --
>> Peter Reid
>> Loughborough, UK