PDF Tools

Overview

Contains multiple Smart Services and Functions for interacting with PDF Documents.

Key Features & Functionality

Smart Services:

Merge PDF - Merges multiple PDF documents into a single document.
Extract PDF Pages - Extracts a range of pages from an existing PDF into a new PDF.
Fill PDF - Populates the fields of a PDF Form and optionally flattens it disallow further changes.
Create PDF Content - Allows text to be added to a PDF with control over the style, position, and angle. An existing PDF can be updated or a new one created from scratch.
Convert PDF to Image - Creates an array of images or a multi-page tiff from a PDF.
Compress PDF - Compresses the images in the PDF to make it smaller.
Un-protect and Copy PDF - Using the document password, create an un-protected copy of a protected PDF.
Convert Image to PDF - Creates a PDF starting from one or many images. It also supports multi-page tiff images.
Encrypt PDF - Encrypts an existing PDF with a password,
Split PDF Pages In Half - Supports spitting individual pdf pages horizontally or vertically with an overlap
Rotate PDF - rotate entire pdf by 90, 180, or 270 degrees
Convert Txt to PDF - Convert a text to pdf with a choice of font type and size

Functions:

Get PDF Metadata - Retrieves metadata on the PDF: page count, title, author, security, encryption, etc.
Get PDF Text - Retrieves the text content from a PDF.
Get PDF Form Fields - Retrieves the populated form field values of an unflattened PDF.
Get PDF Signature Fields - Retrieves the populated signature field values of an unflattened PDF.
Get PDF Bookmarks - Retrieves the list of bookmarks and associated page number in the PDF

Michael Farris over 4 years ago

We recently upgraded to 20.3 and this plugin was dropped from our environments. A suitable alternative for our use-case was the smart service named PDF Doc From Template. (Use a PDF template to populate data into and save as a PDF file in Appian)
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Michael Chirlin over 4 years ago in reply to ramyap826

This error will show up when there is a versioning issue with the plugin cdt. If you look in your tomcat-stdout logs you'll see the actual issue.

Support will point you to https://community.appian.com/.../kb-1097-illegal-attempt-to-change-the-data-type-for-smart-service-x-x-x-input-or-output-named-name-error-thrown-during-plugin-deployment
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Michael Chirlin over 4 years ago in reply to Mike Schmitt

We are using the PDFBox library to insert the fields into the PDF.

You may be running into this issue:

stackoverflow.com/.../form-field-values-set-with-pdfbox-not-visible-in-adobe-reader
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Michael Chirlin over 4 years ago in reply to Michael Nye

This plugin is using the PDFBox java library: https://pdfbox.apache.org/docs/2.0.7/javadocs/org/apache/pdfbox/text/PDFTextStripper.html

If you are seeing issues, they will be present in that library and not fixable directly in the plug-in.
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Michael Chirlin over 4 years ago in reply to Simon Spencer

Was your question on how to modify this plug-in so that you can redeploy it on your environment?
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James Carter over 4 years ago in reply to Vikki

Do you mean for Create PDF Smart Service? Here's an example configuration that produces the following image. You will need to adapt the rules to use the equivalent data types (e.g. rule!PdfText to type!PdfText)

Example PDF.txt
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Simon Spencer over 4 years ago

Hi Druva Kota

Thus plug-in no longer deploys in one of our internal CS Cloud environments. Support have diagnosed this as an issue with a deprecated function to change the data type of a CDT. In this environment there is already a PdFField CDT with a different namespace:

PdfField (http://types.appiancorp.com/ps). Deleting this CDT before deploying the plug-in does not seem to make any difference - the CDT is re- created with the same namespace during the failed deployment.

Deployment error:

2020-10-07 02:25:00,850 [localhost-startStop-1] ERROR com.appiancorp.plugins.LoggingPluginEventListener - Failed to enable Plug-in 'PDF Tools' (pdftools) version 2.2.9: 'There was a problem loading the module descriptor: Fill PDF.<br/>com.appiancorp.suiteapi.common.exceptions.AppianRuntimeException: com.appiancorp.process.admin.IncompatibleSmartServiceRegistrationException: The Smart Service Module was invalid: Illegal attempt to change the data type for smart service pdftools.FillPDFPauseOnError, input or output named PdfFields (APNX-1-4104-005)'

Support recommendation:

In terms of next steps, I recommend following the steps outlined in the following KB to update the CDT version that the plug-in is referencing in the code: community.appian.com/.../kb-1097-illegal-attempt-to-change-the-data-type-for-smart-service-x-x-x-input-or-output-named-name-error-thrown-during-plugin-deployment
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Vikki over 4 years ago

This has NO documentation whatsoever on how to use this properly to generate a PDF. Alternative - Create a PDF template, Use "PDF doc from Template" smart service.
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Michael Nye over 4 years ago

Has anyone run into issues with the "Get PDF Text" function? It doesn't seem to retain the order of text present in the document. It will mix in the header content of the page with the text body of the document.
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Mike Schmitt over 5 years ago in reply to Mike Schmitt

Druva Kota just in case you see this..?
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