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PDF Annotation System

Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2009 5:24 am
by rvercesi
Good Morning

I've been searching online for a PDF Annotation System using PHP but so far I've only come up with solutions like TCPDF, which allows annotations but in PHP generated PDFs.

What I need is the ability to load a PDF from the server filesystem into a browser window or iframe, create annotations online (using boxes or pointers) and them, by clicking a SAVE button, to have such PDF saved (in the servers filesystem) or to save all annotations to a table, so that I can recreate them when reloading the PDF.

Tenho pesquisado online sobre anotações em PDF com PHP e até ao momento só encontrei algo semelhante à classe TCPDF, que permite as anotações mas em PDF gerados via PHP.

Basically I am looking for a way to create an online approval system.

Any help is welcome.

Thank you.

Re: PDF Annotation System

Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2009 7:25 am
by Eric!
The only tools I've seen to manipulate PDFs like this cost a fair bit of money, especially on the server license level.

Why not allow them to download the PDF, annotate locally and then upload the revised copy (or annotations) and track the changes/revisions/submissions with php on your site? It might not be ideal, but it is better than paying the server license fees.

Re: PDF Annotation System

Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2009 8:24 am
by rvercesi
The problem is that I have to accomplish something like http://webproof.com/ so there must be someone, somewhere that has already tackle with this issue.

Re: PDF Annotation System

Posted: Sat Oct 10, 2009 10:49 pm
by Eric!
Sure, and they were all paid the big bucks to do it. Therefore they won't be posting all their hard work for you to copy....

Re: PDF Annotation System

Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2009 7:03 pm
by rvercesi
Of course. I was only wondering if someone else has come across a similar problem and found a viable solution...

Re: PDF Annotation System

Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:53 am
by Eric!
It really depends on your application, your documents and how you want to manage the changes. So I'll just toss some stuff out for you.

I looked into writing my own php code to do something similar on encrypted PDF documents and found the task to be overwhelming for one person. I've used TCPDF and FPDF and found them good for making documents, but it was a bit limited in overall use.

Depending on what you want to do here is a commercial tool for PHP:
http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/

Here's some other ideas that might help depending on your needs:
http://www.hotscripts.com/category/php/ ... ation/pdf/

I, Librarian is a set of free PHP tools to manage PDF's
http://www.bioinformatics.org/librarian/

It stores annotations in sqlite, maybe you could modify the code to do what you want. I've never used it, I just came across it a few days ago.

Or depending on your server type, maybe you could do your pdf manipulation via command line tools and make a simple interface on-line for it using PDFEdit http://pdfedit.petricek.net/en/index.html