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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T11:37:15+00:00

I’m trying to find out if there’s a way to embed an editable text

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I’m trying to find out if there’s a way to embed an editable text cell in a PDF generated in a Qt application. I’m currently using QPrinter to generate the PDF, but if there’s another library that could do this, that would be fine. The environment is limited, though, to C or C++, so libraries like iText are out. In terms of form capabilities, this pdf,
http://examples.itextpdf.com/results/part2/chapter08/text_fields.pdf, is a good example with the exception that I don’t need a password text field.

Thanks,
Frank

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This may not be terribly helpful, but I’ll throw it out there anyway.

    1. wkhtmltopdf is based on QTWebkit.
    2. One of its command line options is to convert HTML fields into PDF fields (off by default).
    3. There’s almost no pdf-related code within wkhtmltopdf. Certainly nothing dealing with fields. Something upstream is doing the PDF conversion for them.

    So find out what that "something" is and you’re golden.

    EDIT: That or spend a lot of time writing JNI wrappers for iText. :/ Having done so myself, I can say it’d be much more interesting to write a JNI generator tailored to iText, but far more practical to write a Java app that uses iText and then make JNI calls from your C/C++ app to pass the data it’ll need and retrieve any response.

    1. The form field borders are a part of the page, not the field itself. Odd, but that’s not the first time I’ve encountered it. Our own software, LiquidOffice, used to generate fields with backgrounds AcroForms couldn’t support the same way (now we use an icon-only button).

    2. Those Real PDF Fields have their visibility flags set to "visible but doesn’t print" within the pDF. I doubt wkhtmltopdf will let you control that directly. Patch time.

      BUT, you could make a second pass with some PDF manipulation library to go through and change the visibility settings on your fields. I’m partial to iText, but there are many other fish in that particular sea.

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