I have a savable PDF file that has a bunch of fields that users will fill out. From there I’d like to batch process these files by extracting the user entered fields into a CVS file.
Since I’m a .NET guy, I’ve taken a look at both PDFBox and iTextSharp. With PDFBox I was able to extract the form’s text, but not the fields that a user would enter on the fields. This doesn’t seem that trivial using these, although I could be wrong.
Is there a faster way to complete this in any other language? I’ve heard about a Adobe SDK and will research that next, but I know nothing about it so far. Or does someone know how to accomplish what I’m trying to do with the before mentioned libraries?
UPDATE: No one knows of any open source or free libraries? I’m doing this more of a proof of concept and don’t have a few hundy to throw at the problem.
Although I haven’t used this particular product from ASPOSE, the ASPOSE.Pdf.Kit component will extract both field names and field data.
From their literature:
“You can also Read all form fields of the PDF documents including their names and values into XML, FDF (Form Data Format) and XFDF files.”