How To Rearrange Letters In A PDF

Recently I was tasked with modifying a PDF.  Specifically, I was asked to take an existing PDF template and replace placeholder text with dynamic content.  Since I've worked with PDFs before, I knew that it might be somewhat difficult but hopefully not something I couldn't handle given my prior experience.

THE PROCESS

The process, that was explained to me, was that I would receive a PDF "template" that contained a background image and text embedded in the PDF. What I need to do was to find a way to replace this hard-coded template text with dynamic text from the database.

LIBRARIES

I started by looking into all the PDF libraries I could find that might help me. There was some mention of Perl scripts throughout my research but that didn't seem to work for me. I eventually settled on a couple of useful libraries. One was the TET (Text Extraction Toolkit). It was very useful in determining the font, color, and positioning of text within the PDF. Another useful library was PageCatcher by ReportLab. They had the ability to leverage an existing PDF as a "canvas" and write text on it.

SOLUTION

Unfortunately, the solution I proposed required 2 PDFs, one with the hard-coded text and another that was a blank canvas to write on. I was able to use the TET library to extract the text information from the first PDF and then write my dynamic text on the second PDF.

There seems to be a possible solution to actually replace existing text within a PDF. Another thing that I learned is that fonts within a PDF are closely tied with the actual text and not necessarily the PDF in general. This means that if you wanted to replace certain letters in a PDF, you would also need another page in the PDF that has all the letters in the alphabet as a source to be used to replace the existing text.