Pdf-lib: Changing appearances of widgets

[emilsedgh]

This is an amazing project! Clean code, nice documentation, extremely supportive on issues, etc. Impressive work.

I have a question regarding form widget annotations. The API to add new annotations is pretty straightforward.

My use case however is to manipulate existing ones.

I didn't find much available on the documentation, but digging through the code, I started doing this:

const PDFLib = require('pdf-lib')
const fs = require('fs').promises

const { rgb } = PDFLib

const run = async () => {
  const buffer = await fs.readFile(process.argv[2])
  const doc = await PDFLib.PDFDocument.load(buffer)

  const form = doc.getForm()

  for(field of form.getFields()) {
    if (field.constructor.name !== 'PDFTextField')
      continue

    field.setText('one punch man')
    const [ widget ] = field.acroField.getWidgets()
    const ac = widget.getAppearanceCharacteristics()
    ac.setBackgroundColor(rgb(0,1,0))

    widget.getBorderStyle().setWidth(10)
    ac.setBorderColor(rgb(1,1,0))
  }

  await fs.writeFile(process.argv[3], await doc.save())
}

run()

The purpose of this script is to iterate through all forms and change the background color and border color of text fields.

The problem im facing is that the pdf saves fine, but none of the changes i made to widgets are effective. The input pdf and output pdf's widget background colors and border colors are the same.

Any ideas?

[ajaishankar]

Can you try form.markFieldAsDirty(field.ref)?

[emilsedgh]

Hey @ajaishankar I just gave it a try. No luck unfortunately. No errors, but the output is still the same.

[rickhall]

For some further clarification, I did use your above code to set my border width to 0 and that did correctly remove the border. Color changes didn't work for me either, though.

[Hopding]

Hello @emilsedgh!

You need to use the colorToComponents(...) function. Note also that the best way to check what subtype of PDFField you're working with is instanceof.

I've updated the snippet you shared below:

import { colorToComponents, PDFDocument, PDFTextField, rgb } from 'pdf-lib';

(async () => {
  const dodBytes = await fetch(
    'https://pdf-lib.js.org/assets/dod_character.pdf',
  ).then((res) => res.arrayBuffer());

  const pdfDoc = await PDFDocument.load(dodBytes);

  const form = pdfDoc.getForm();

  for (const field of form.getFields()) {
    if (field instanceof PDFTextField) {
      field.setText('one punch man');

      const [widget] = field.acroField.getWidgets();
      const ac = widget.getAppearanceCharacteristics();
      ac?.setBackgroundColor(colorToComponents(rgb(0, 1, 0)));

      widget.getBorderStyle()?.setWidth(5);
      ac?.setBorderColor(colorToComponents(rgb(1, 0, 0)));
    }
  }

  const pdfBytes = await pdfDoc.save();
})();

This script produces a document that looks like the following:

>

As you observed, pdf-lib does not provide high-level APIs for modifying the widget properties of existing form fields. So it is necessary to use low-level APIs that are not well documented. But I would very much like to add high-level APIs for this. If you're interested in submitting a PR, I'd be happy to provide guidance!

[emilsedgh]

Hey @Hopding
Thank you so much for the fantastic library and great support.