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I have a PDF that has a fillable form on it. You can see an example of such a PDF here. When I open this link in chrome, I'm guessing it uses the built in PDF viewer and I'm able to fill in the dropdowns and textarea inputs.

I want to replicate this behavior on a site. My goal is to load the PDF on a site, let the users fill in the form, submit it, and then upload the modified PDF to our servers.

Can anyone recommend a library that can accomplish this? I've looked at a few libraries, including mozillas PDF.js, but I haven't found something that works.

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  • I too am looking for this. There are a few paid services that let you annotate a PDF from a browser, like pdfjs.express, but they are INSANELY expensive, at $375/month. The only option I have been able to find so far is to convert the PDF into images, one per page, with something like pypi.org/project/pdf2image, and use a library like marker.js to let the client modify those images, and somehow reupload them to the server when they are done. Does anyone know of an easier way that doesn't cost anything?
    – John
    Feb 25, 2020 at 22:25
  • I realize the normal way to do this is to convert the PDF into an HTML form, but if you are dealing with dozens of PDF files, each one containing multiple pages, you're going to tie up a ton of some developer's time converting PDFs to HTML.
    – John
    Feb 25, 2020 at 22:30

1 Answer 1

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Syncfusion Essential PDF Viewer can be used to display PDF documents and fill forms.

Form Filling in Essential PDF Viewer

The entire product is available for free through the community license program if you qualify (less than 1 million USD in revenue). The community license is the full product with no limitations. Paid licenses start at $995 per year per developer.

Note: I work for Syncfusion.

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  • Sounds interesting, but I have a few questions: 1) Does it only work with ASP.NET? I work in Django (python) in a Linux environment, and know nothing about ASP.NET. If there is a way to just use your javascript frontend and keep our backend, that would be amazing, and 2) Does it support a Submit button in the PDF that will send the data to our server, as well as redirect the user to wherever the server tells it to after a submit?
    – John
    Feb 29, 2020 at 15:11
  • @John 1. It requires .NET/.NET Core based backend. You can run .NET Core on Linux. You will need to add Syncfusion.EJ2.PdfViewer.AspNet.Core.Linux assembly. 2. Yes. A submit button can be added and the change will be posted to the .NET Core backend and you can redirect the user as needed. Please log a request with Syncfusion support if you are interested in using the .NET Core version.
    – Davis Jebaraj
    Mar 3, 2020 at 13:58

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