Today we are proud to announce the release of our new WordPress plugin, the PDF Forms Filler for WPForms. After a long and tedious development effort, the plugin has finally reached maturity and, I must say, it turned out very nice.

Port

The new plugin is basically a port of our PDF Forms Filler for CF7 plugin to WPForms. It features the same functionality of the PDF Forms Filler for CF7 plugin, translated over to WPForms. In a lot of ways the same features were improved and expanded.

Smart tags

The infinitely useful mail-tags feature of Contact Form 7 has been translated into WPForms‘ smart tags feature. There is a large selection of smart tags to chose from in WPForms form builder. Smart tags can be mapped to PDF fields, used for image embedding and used in filled PDF filename and in save path.

Notifications & Confirmations

The new plugin integrates with WPForms‘ notifications and confirmations features slightly differently than the CF7 plugin was integrating with Contact Form 7. However, in many ways it works out better!

If you are interested in diving deep into the feature set of the new plugin then we suggest you install the plugin and give it a try. The new plugin documentation is on its way and will be launched in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, if you need support, try the plugin forum, submit a support ticket, or look at CF7 plugin’s documentation which describes the same features available in the new plugin.

Happy PDF form filling!

We have been working for a while towards a new major release of the PDF Forms Filler for CF7 plugin. It is finally ready to be released. The new version offers many great improvements.

Multi-select Field Support

The new version has support for multi-select fields. You can now create select form-tags with the ‘multiple’ option and map them to PDF listbox fields that have the multi-select flag.

Better Admin UX with select2.js Dropdowns

We have switched from plain old select dropdowns to select2.js dropdowns to improve user experience. No longer do you need to scroll through a large unsorted list of fields to find the one field that you are looking for. You can now use the search box! Additionally, UI load times have been improved.

New ‘Value Mapping’ Feature

One of the most annoying things about the plugin was the way checkbox filling was configured. PDF checkboxes always have export values like ‘Yes’ and ‘On’, which isn’t very convenient. No one wants to use CF7 fields with such unfriendly-named options. CF7 pipes was the recommended solution, however, users would still have to deal with strangely named PDF export values on the back end. We have now remedied this problematic situation! You can now create multiple value mappings for each field mapping. This also creates a more friendly way to map a single CF7 checkbox with multiple options to multiple PDF checkboxes with the same export value. There are additional use cases for this new feature.

The new release also contains bug fixes and other improvements. We recommend you try it out as soon as possible.

We have also launched the plugin website, pdfformsfiller.org, with new plugin documentation. You are invited to visit and browse the helpful articles we have so far.

To celebrate the major version release, we are running a sale on all products. Get yours today!

Today we unveil a new version of our API product – Pdf.Ninja v2! The new version has been in development for a long time. It’s finally time to release it to the world.

The API version 2 is available alongside API version 1. Both versions will continue to be supported going forward. Version 2 is accessible at https://pdf.ninja/api/v2/{endpoint}. Version 1 will continue to be available at the usual URL, https://pdf.ninja/api/v1/{endpoint}. The API interface is virtually the same, with some small exceptions.

Version 2 has a number of major improvements:

• The backend has been completely reworked.
• The font rendering issues have been resolved.
• XFA forms are now supported.
• JavaScript is now executed during the PDF modification process. You can use PDFs that rely on internal JavaScript.
• Image input and output formats have been changed. We added PDF as an acceptable input for the embed endpoint. We’ve removed PS and EPS formats and added PDF, WebP, TIFF and BMP for the image endpoint.
• The embed endpoint now supports the ‘frame’ argument. It can be used to select an individual frame or page to be inserted from the input image.

We’ve also increased some of the rate limits to help avoid issues users have experienced in the past.

You can continue using the same API key when you switch to the new version. We recommend you give it a try.

We are excited to announce the launch of a new product! The PDF Forms Filler for CF7 Enterprise Extension version 2 has long been in the works. It is finally ready for production.

The new product is a largely rewritten Enterprise Extension (version 1), released as a separate product. The switch to Foxit PDF SDK adds a number of features, such as support for XFA forms, JavaScript execution, support for chroot environments and a great deal of additional functionality and improvements.

There are some small differences in the resulting PDFs with the new version. We decided to make the new version a separate product due to having a significantly different back end. We will continue to maintain the old product for those users that want to continue using the first version. Users that purchased the first version prior to June 1st, 2021 and wish to upgrade can order the second version of the product free of charge by submitting a request.

We are having a 50% off product launch promotion on the new product for a limited time. Get yours today!

Contact Form 7 version 5.4 is now fully supported by PDF Forms Filler for Contact Form 7 starting with version 1.3.9. As stated in the previous news post, there were some breaking changes. All of the problems with the new version have now been resolved. Users that are still experiencing issues are asked to report them to our support section.

Contact Form 7 version 5.4 was released on February 24, 2021. It contains a lot of breaking changes which cause many issues with PDF Forms Filler for Contact Form 7. We are currently working on making PDF Forms Filler for Contact Form 7 compatible with the new version of Contact Form 7. Meanwhile, the solution at this time is to downgrade to a previous version of Contact Form 7 (version 5.3.2). Please take care to not delete your existing forms when you perform the downgrade (don’t delete the Contact Form 7 plugin). You can use the WP Rollback plugin to do the downgrade. Be sure to disable auto-updates for the Contact Form 7 plugin to avoid it being automatically updated again.

The release announcement post by the developer of Contact Form 7 goes into more details about what changed. The changes that affect PDF Forms Filler for Contact Form 7 are as follows:
1. The hiding of add_uploaded_file() function.
2. Changed output from WPCF7_Submission::uploaded_files().
3. Download link feature is affected (plain text version of the response message is now shown instead of the HTML version)

We are going to be releasing a new version with compatibility fixes once they become available.

Filling PDF documents with Pdf.Ninja API has evolved! Now users are able to not only fill form fields but also embed images, take screenshots of pages and query for detailed PDF properties and metadata.

The image embedding feature was the most popular among user requests and a great deal of work has been put into designing the new feature.  Images can be embedded into every page or on specific pages at desired locations.

Page image feature may also be useful when combined with the PDF information feature to allow users to generate thumbnails of documents and list document details.

See Pdf.Ninja API homepage for documentation.

The PDF Forms Filler for Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin makes use of the Pdf.Ninja API to fill forms in PDF files.  However, many enterprise users need the ability to perform PDF file manipulation directly on their web servers.  In order to fulfill this need, the enterprise extension plugin was born.

Features

• Enables the use of locally installed PDFtk & QPDF software OR bundled binaries to work with PDF files.
• Does not require rebuilding existing Contact Form 7 forms that use PDF Forms Filler for Contact Form 7 functionality.  Simply install the extension plugin and PDF Forms Filler for Contact Form 7 will start using it automatically.

The PDF Forms Filler for Contact Form 7 Enterprise Extension can be ordered here.

The PDF Forms Filler for Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin is finally here!  It allows users to make use of the Pdf.Ninja API to fill forms in PDF files.

Features

• Retrieve PDF form fields and generate form tags
• Fill the form fields in a PDF file and attaches the file to the submission email message

The pdf forms plugin can be downloaded here.

I am pleased to announce a launch of the web API for working with PDF files.  This API provides a number of features that make it easy to perform a set of tasks in constrained hosting environments and browser side code.

Features

• Read PDF file from a publicly accessible URL
• Read PDF file from a POST request
• Retrieve PDF form fields
• Fill the form fields in a PDF file

The API is available at https://pdf.ninja/.