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This is really neat! For work, I've found myself from time to time exploring the tech around PDFs. I find this tech strangely fascinating. It's like a shim on top of something old and ugly that enables integration with much more modern systems.

Some quick feedback (and a shameless plug):

The CLI interface should output JSON. It would be nice to combin with a CLI JSON parser such as jq[0].

Shameless plug: I've been working on a PDF CLI aimed at making it easier to programmatically fill out PDF forms: https://github.com/adelevie/pdfq. It provides an interface and some wrappers on top of the main pdf form-filling tool, pdftk. For example, you can get json out of a pdf form like this:

    pdftk hello.pdf dump_data_fields | pdfq
Or you can generate FDF from a json file:

    cat hello.json | pdfq json_to_fdf
You can also fill a pdf without touching an fdf code:

    pdfq set foo bar input.pdf output.pdf
[0] https://stedolan.github.io/jq/



PDF is less proprietary than most people think. It is an ISO standard after all and it is a bit complicated but it does solve the problem of making "printable" documents produced by all sorts of tools available online.


pdfx will output json if you use the -j flag!

    pdfx -j <file-or-url.pdf>
jq looks neat btw.


I should have read the [] manual :)




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