Support for pdftk-java

[nathanhruby]

Hi,

Debian was (as far as I can tell) the last distro to support libgcj and pdftk. As of Buster they are no longer supporting it

• https://packages.debian.org/buster/pdftk
  Instead they are replacing it with a port of pdftk to java:
• https://gitlab.com/pdftk-java/pdftk

Does pdf-forms work with or support pdftk-java?

[jkraemer]

I never looked into this, but it seems that a simple wrapper script around the java -jar pdftk-all.jar call (passing on any command line options) which would then be set as the pdftk executable in pdf-forms (PdfForms.new('/path/to/script')) might work.

Please report back if you give this a try, so we can add it to the README.

[pavel-jurasek]

Hi,
it's working just deployed to our platform. java-pdftk works.

Wrapper script:

#!/bin/sh
MYSELF=`which "$0" 2>/dev/null`
[ $? -gt 0 -a -f "$0" ] && MYSELF="./$0"
java=java
if test -n "$JAVA_HOME"; then
    java="$JAVA_HOME/bin/java"
fi
exec "$java" $java_args -jar $MYSELF "$@"
exit 1

how to create wrapper:

cat /bin/stub.sh /pdftk/build/libs/pdftk-all.jar > pdftk.run && chmod +x pdftk.run

Executable JAVA PDFTk

pdftk.run

[jkraemer]

thank you! I added this info to the README.

[tfmertz]

Hmm, we were able to get it working without a java wrapper script just by installing the pdftk-java package and passing through that executable to pdf-forms gem. Maybe we just go lucky and our distro had that package? Or the docs are a bit out of date.

Running on ruby:2.6.6 container (Debian Buster)

apt-get update && apt-get install -y pdftk-java
which pdftk
# returns something like /usr/bin/pdftk

In rails code

pdftk = PdfForms.new('/usr/bin/pdftk')

Hope that's helpful, if it's wrong I welcome any corrections or insights :)

[pavel-jurasek]

Hmm, we were able to get it working without a java wrapper script just by installing the pdftk-java package and passing through that executable to pdf-forms gem. Maybe we just go lucky and our distro had that package? Or the docs are a bit out of date.

Running on ruby:2.6.6 container (Debian Buster)

apt-get update && apt-get install -y pdftk-java
which pdftk
# returns something like /usr/bin/pdftk

In rails code

pdftk = PdfForms.new('/usr/bin/pdftk')

Hope that's helpful, if it's wrong I welcome any corrections or insights :)

Hi, indeed on Debian base operation system it would work, but our platform running on Alpine where pdftk-java is not available..

[mikeappell]

Not sure if this is helpful, but this works for us to install the current latest version of pdftk-java using a native image in a Docker container and use it with pdf-forms.

Most recent binary should be reflected here: https://gitlab.com/pdftk-java/pdftk#pre-built-binaries

RUN wget -O /usr/bin/pdftk "https://gitlab.com/pdftk-java/pdftk/-/jobs/1527259632/artifacts/raw/build/native-image/pdftk" \
    && chmod a+x /usr/bin/pdftk

and then

PdfForms.new('/usr/bin/pdftk')