Possible to append arbitrary data to PDFs, like CSVs?

[mrchrisadams]

Hi there,

I recently read this blog post about using PDFs as a container for bundling documents like reports with structured data like JSON, or csv files.

In the world of C#, there is now a tool that I understand will let you take a PDF file, and then append an arbitrary csv or json file, so you can bundle structured data into a PDF:

http://tomforth.co.uk/pdfattacher/

Something like this also appears to have been implemented in Java too, here

https://github.com/Aiybe/PDFData

How complex would it be using pdfkit, so you can run it with on the command line, or incorporate it into a cross platform electron app?

I can see there are methods like doc.note(), or doc.image(), but they seem to assume the presence of a page there already, and as I understand it the idea of attaching data to the PDF container works at a level up from a page.

Guessing what an API might look like:

PDFDocument = require 'pdfkit'

# Create a document
doc = new PDFDocument

# Pipe its output somewhere, like to a file or HTTP response
# See below for browser usage
doc.pipe fs.createWriteStream('output.pdf')

# Add text as per normal examples
doc.text('Here is some narrative text !', 100, 100)

# Attach json file
doc.data('path/to/data.json', datatype: "json")

# Finalize PDF file
doc.end()

I'm not that familiar with the PDF format, so if there's a link you'd suggest I look into, to understand more about how to work with pdfkit for this, I'm happy to do so.

[larshp]

similar to #655

[tuxpoldo]

There is a pull request available for file attachments and annotations: #1226