Of course if you can control the order in which things are printed, you needn't merge the forms at all. then you're not really merging PDF forms any more. There are a couple approaches, the easiest of them being to 'flatten' the fields so they are just page contents (line art & text). The aforementioned iText (and several others) can do this programmatically, other apps have command lines.Īny page that might need to be repeated should be it's own form in this environment. There are a number of mail-merge-esque products floating around that can take in an FDF and PDF and produce a filled PDF form. '/F' is the path to the form to be filled. '/V' indicates a field value, '/T' is a field's title. Here's a sample (with extra whitespace to make it more readable): %FDF-1.2 Opening the FDF fills the PDF (via a file association with acrobat/reader).

FDF files are fairly trivial to generate, and contain a pile of field/value pairs (and can hold list options, and other fancier stuff you won't need) and a file association. And that's a terrible spec document, it only covers a small (infrequently used, complicated) part of the FDF format.

Open source fillable pdf creator