See www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit for details on the basic functionality provided by pdftk.
This fork is meant to enhance the basic PDFTk functionality in 2 areas:
-
Custom stamping over form fields
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Chaining various operation commands in a single process call
Custom stamping to PDFs can be performed using the stamp_detailed operation like so:
pdftk source.pdf stamp_detailed stamp_data.xfdf output result.pdf
In the example above:
- source.pdf
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the file to which we are adding the image stamp(s)
- stamp_data.xfdf
-
the xfdf formatted file containing the stamp(s) information. Similar to the
fill_formoperation, this file should contain form-field name-value pairs using base64-encoded image data for the value of the fields being stamped.See the XFDF spec for specific information.
- result.pdf
-
the output file made up of
source.pdfmerged with the stamp data contained instamp_data.xfdf
Operations can be chained together in one pass. So rather than calling:
pdftk source.pdf fill_form form_data.xfdf output - | pdftk - stamp_detailed stamp_data.xfdf output result.pdf
You can call the following:
pdftk source.pdf fill_form form_data.xfdf stamp_detailed stamp_data.xfdf output result.pdf
Besides avoiding repetition, only one pdftk process needs to be instantiated. This can significantly reduce overhead where many operations are required, or where only a couple of operations are being used on very large files.