Printing text on pdf that has a fillable form

Question

I am currently using FPDI to print numbers on a static pdf document. When I try to do the same with a pdf that has a fillable form on it FPDI throws an error:

"This document ([pdf path]) probably uses a compression technique which is not supported by the free parser shipped with FPDI."

Reading the docs FPDI is appearently not capable of doing this. Searching for alteratives didn't bring me that far (I mostly find ways to prefill form fields ... but i need to print out a number outside of the form area)

Does anybody know a solution for this (eg alternative libs)?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Generally the issue is not directly related to the fact that the document has forms but it uses a compression technic introduced in PDF 1.5. We (Setasign) offer support for this type of documents in FPDI through a commercial add-on .

Anyhow this would still not help you, because FPDI is not able to copy form fields to the resulting document.

If you want to edit the original document without creating a new one (what you do with FPDI) you may check out the SetaPDF-Stamper component. It allows you to add new content to pages while not changing anything else.