Automatically Reading PDF Forms

The Portable Document Format (PDF)1 is a great example of how an originally brilliant concept for displaying print documents has been ruined over decades. Initially conceived as successor to PostScript,2 it has degenerated into a universal container format. Text, images, vectors, scripts, fonts, form data, even complete 3D models there’s hardly anything, that can’t end up in a PDF, including Doom.3 The PDF Pseudo-Standard In practice this means: Hardly any two PDFs are alike. A single piece of information can be packaged in a dozen different ways, depending on which program was used to create it.4 And we haven’t even gotten to the topic of signatures yet.5 Read more