I’m currently doing a task where I’m taking forms from a local government body, and converting them so that they are able to have a PDF generated dynamically via FPDF based on passed parameters. Currently the only copies of these documents are in read-only pdf files. What I’m wondering is if there is a way to have these files read somehow to where these documents could be converted into FPDF format somehow? Normally I’d just create them manually, but with 50 files to convert, and with some being multiple page forms, it’ll probably take months, and hence looking for a quicker way.
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The short answer is you’re stuck. As far as I and my many hours of research know there’s no such process. I would love to be proven wrong.
I recently went through a similar situation with insurance forms. I used the free trial of Adobe Live Cycle Designer to build out the forms. It basically turns the old pdf into a flat background image you can draw form fields over. Then I used PDF Toolkit and PDFTK-PHP to populate the fields.
The process wasn’t ideal but it worked out well enough. I setup 20 forms consisting of about 50 pages with filling code and some other operations in a week.