How to fill an existing PDF document programmatically

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I have a PDF document which wasn’t created using Adobe LifeCycle Designer. What I am looking to do is pre-fill out the common fields in the document.

I have looked into this many of the options available to me from using iTextSharp and PDFSharp but unsure of how to use it correctly.

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I recently came across this article: FillPDF which has a good documentation but didn’t match with what I was creating.

I also was reading about iTextSharp which can be imported in VS and used but I am not sure where to start. I saw a lot of tutorials but none of them describe how to start.

Please help…

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  1. I recently worked on a huge project with itextsharp

    http://www.mikesdotnetting.com/Article/88/iTextSharp-Drawing-shapes-and-Graphics
    http://www.mikesdotnetting.com/Article/81/iTextSharp-Working-with-Fonts

    here are some things to get you started

    but as far as reading from a pdf and then outputting back
    you will need some regex to help you with that.

    here is one of the sample code i have ( this creates a header or footer on every new page event )

    using CMS;
using CMS.Tags;
using CMS.Pages;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.Linq;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Net;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using iTextSharp.text;
using iTextSharp.text.html;
using iTextSharp.text.xml;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf.draw;
using System.IO;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.Text;
using System.util;

public class pdfPage : iTextSharp.text.pdf.PdfPageEventHelper
{
public override void OnEndPage(PdfWriter writer, Document doc)
    {
        PdfContentByte cb = writer.DirectContent;
        cb.SetLineWidth(1f);
        cb.SetCMYKColorStroke(66, 59, 57, 38);
        cb.MoveTo(30, 55);     
        cb.LineTo(doc.PageSize.Width - 30 , 55);     
        cb.Stroke();
        cb.MoveTo(185, 80);
        cb.LineTo(185, 25);
        cb.Stroke();

        ColumnText ct = new ColumnText(cb);
        BaseFont bfTimes = BaseFont.CreateFont(BaseFont.HELVETICA, BaseFont.CP1252, false);
        Font times = new Font(bfTimes, 10);
        times.SetColor(90, 90, 90);
        ct.SetSimpleColumn(new Phrase("text text", times), 60, 60, 175, 78, 15, Element.ALIGN_MIDDLE);
        ct.Go();
        times.SetColor(1, 73, 144);
        ct.SetSimpleColumn(new Phrase("text textn", times), 60, 38, 175, 55, 15, Element.ALIGN_MIDDLE);
        ct.Go();
        times.SetColor(90, 90, 90);
        ct.SetSimpleColumn(new Phrase("text here", times), 190, 60, doc.PageSize.Width - 32 , 78, 15, Element.ALIGN_RIGHT);
        ct.Go();
        times.SetColor(90, 90, 90);
        ct.SetSimpleColumn(new Phrase("text here", times), 190, 38, doc.PageSize.Width - 32 , 55, 15, Element.ALIGN_RIGHT);
        ct.Go();
    }
}

    this is part of my code that starts a pdf

    using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
        {
            using (var doc = new Document(PageSize.LETTER, 220f, 30f, 115f, 100f)){

                try
                {
                  pdfPage page = new pdfPage();
                  PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, ms);
                  writer.PageEvent = page;
                  doc.Open();

                iTextSharp.text.Image img = iTextSharp.text.Image.GetInstance(RESOURCE);
                img.ScalePercent(49f);
                //img.Width = doc.PageSize.Width;
                //img.Alignment = iTextSharp.text.Image.ALIGN_CENTER;
                img.SetAbsolutePosition(-8, 
                    doc.PageSize.Height - 180.6f);
                doc.Add(img);

    and this is my output code ( as a download pdf directly created from server *notsaved on server )

    }
                catch (Exception ex)
                {
                  //Log error;
                }
                finally
                {
                  doc.Close();
                }

            }
            Response.Clear();
              //Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
              Response.ContentType = "application/octet-stream";
              Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment;filename= Company " + namefile + ".pdf");
              Response.Buffer = true; 
              Response.Clear();
              var bytes = ms.ToArray();
              Response.OutputStream.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
              Response.OutputStream.Flush();

        }