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Information
  • Author: Appian Corporation
  • Type: Plug-in (Function & Smart Service)
  • Support: This is an Appian supported plug-in. To the extent that this plug-in does not conform to its documentation, please submit a ticket to Appian Technical Support. Appian does not support customer-created customizations or outdated versions of the plug-in.
  • Industry: All Industries
  • Compatible Version(s): 26.4
  • First Released:
  • Last Updated:
  • Cost: Free - Appian Supported
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Home » AppMarket » PDF Tools

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
  • Split PDF Into Chunks - Splits a PDF document into multiple smaller PDFs with a specified number of pages per chunk

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

  • Find Pages with Text - Retrieves an array of page numbers that contain a specified search string within the PDF

Anonymous

  • Hi. Thank you for this plugin. We really enjoy it Slight smile

    We are using the smart service "Convert PDF to Image", and the function "Get PDF Text". Both of these, and probably the same for every smart service+function in this plugin, have the risk of throwing an exception when provided with invalid PDFs. I.e. when you have a PDF that is valid to view in documentviewer, but have corrupt metadata. 

    We are using it on arbitrary PDFs and we have a small percentage of PDFs failing to progress through the process. It is currently not possible to perform exception handling in a process model, so it would be nice to see a version of this plugin where exceptions are caught and returned through output parameters. 

  • Hi Chris,

    I have installed PDF tools plug-in in cloud environment, however I was unable to see the function named "Get PDF Form Fields",

    I have checked the source code file named "PDFToolsFunctions.java" for the function but no luck

    Can you please help me on this.

    Cloud version : 19.4

  • Hi Chris 

    We've just updated the PDF Tools plug in to the current version and I note the Admin Console is showing the version as 

    <version>2.2.5-SNAPSHOT</version>

    Is this the correct version of the Plug In for use ? 

    Many thanks

  • Hello,

    We are trying to install the PDF Tools plugin within our on premise Appian environment, but are encountering an error message along the way. We are using 19.3.81.0 (19.3 with Hotfix C) and are using MySQL8.x for the database on an Amazon Linux 2 server.

    The error is the following:

    Appian Plugin Hot Deploy] ERROR com.appiancorp.plugins.LoggingPluginEventListener - Failed to enable Plug-in 'PDF Tools' (pdftools) version 2.1.0: '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.FillPDF, input or output named PdfFields (APNX-1-4104-005)

    I'm new to the admin side of Appian and am not overly familiar with a number of details. f this is the wrong place to pose this question, please let me know.

  • Hi Team,

    I have facing some issue in smart service ( "PDF FROM HTML"). I got the error like "java.lang.NullPointerException". I am sure and I gave all details in smart service but still cannot find the issue.

    Regards,
    Karthik S

  • Hi, we're running into issue with the Merge PDF feature where embedded fonts are not being deduplicated (greatly increasing the size of the final PDF). Does anyone have a method to optimize the final PDF?

  • Hello,Can you please let me know the max memory size of the pdf's that can be used to merge to convert into one using the PDF Tools plugin. 

  • Hello, we are starting a new project in an Appian Cloud environment, probably 19.3, using the getpdffields() function, is this plugin supported? What kind of libraries this plugin use? Can we assume that in further release this plugin will be supported?

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