Hello, this release is all about PDF generation!

A new command interprets a JSON structure representing page declarations and renders PDF pages accordingly:

pdfcpu create in.json [in.pdf] out.pdf

in.json contains a page sequence with content composed of text, images, colored boxes, tables and more. Each content element follows a box model consisting of margin, border and padding and may define fonts and colors where appropriate. You may also set general page attributes like paper size, background color or your crop box and you may also define your page headers and footers.

in.pdf if present, existing page content of in.pdf will be modified by appending to it.

out.pdf is where rendered pages are written to.

How it works

The way this command is setup allows for repeatedly adding content to a PDF. This fosters an incremental approach to PDF generation which may be during the design phase or in production.

Learning

The best documentation for this command is the combination of the content of:

• pkg/testdata/json/ and
• pkg/samples/create/ - the home of the corresponding result PDFs.

If you are a Go developer you can play around with createFromJSON_test.go by modifying the JSON file and then executing the test which will give you immediate visual feedback by regenerating the corresponding result PDF.

The JSON is self explanatory and I highly recommend working through all the examples!

Many of the examples are multi page PDFs so make sure you don't miss anything!

You will learn about

• setting up your layout coordinate system
• absolute vs. anchored positioning
• inheritance of fonts, margin, border, padding
• setting up your custom colors
• setting up your resource dirs for imageBoxes
• setting up pools for reused boxes, images and text
• using guides throughout the layout process
• how to highlight your crop box and content boxes

Note

Although this command allows for the modification of any PDF it works best for PDFs generated by pdfcpu itself.

PDF Forms

Eventually and this release is really the preparation you will be able to create your PDF forms with this command.

To catch a glimpse of this effort have a look at:

• pkg/testdata/json/textfield.json
• pkg/testdata/json/textarea.json
• pkg/testdata/json/checkbox.json
• pkg/testdata/json/radiobuttonsHor.json

and again the corresponding PDF files in pkg/samples/create/

You are welcome to experiment with form generation based on these form element samples but PDF form creation has NOT been released!

🙏 Thanks everybody for submitting issues and PRs 🙏

Thank you for using pdfcpu 💚

Changelog

e89570a Fix OS agnostic fileName resolving dc0561f Bump version 72e4e71 Relax validation for FontDescriptor Lang 9616d4b Add create cmd 3c08a45 Add Stefan Huber as contributor 92bfd3e Extend relaxed validation for CIDToGIDMap c3eb4c0 Fix #335, #358 ba9f089 Fix #349 281745f Fix #353 b80c13b Fix #354 64e3df6 Fix #356 5e1ae87 Fix #362 befba81 Fix #366 5a7da1d Fix #371 437ef37 Fix #380, #387 4adf70c Fix #381 0c4c829 Fix #386 af9e334 Fix #388 6509cea Fix #394 8837dd1 Fix io.Reader based encryption #372 ce70c15 Merge branch 'pr/signalwerk/360' into master 16f43aa stamping: Fix OCG reuse 7e1546b validate cmd: wildcard support