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Participant
January 23, 2020
Question

Import Page-Specific Data to Populate Form Fields on a Multi-Page PDF

  • January 23, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 506 views

Hi all, I've been researching documentation, but can't find a specific solution to my issue, maybe someone here can help:

 

I have a multi-page PDF, and I want to add some custom text to every page. The custom text is just a number, e.g., 01, 02, or 03, placed on the same position on every page, sized and underlined. The custom text is to be supplied from a spreadsheet, which could be reformatted to whatever file type would work best, e.g., XLSX, CSV, etc. To acomplish to task completely, I assume I'd need to take 2 specific steps:

 

1. In Acrobat Pro: On the multi-page PDF, create a formatted form field that will appear on every page, and allow for custom population of the form field on each individual page.

2. Import data from a provided file format to populate the form-fields, page by page.

 

I'll take any suggestions on how to do this, and I am not limited to Adobe products. I currently manage data in Google Sheets, and custom edit multi-page PDFs with MacOS Preview (manually, page by page), so I'm open to anything; using Acrobat Pro and Excel, using Google apps, or any other cloud-based or third-party apps.

 

Thanks for your time and help.

 

 

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2 replies

Thom Parker
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 23, 2020

I've written many Acrobat scripts that import a CSV or XML file and use the data to operate on a PDF. There's a decent amout of coding involved fir parsing the CSV, but if you know the CSV will be a simple format (no quotes, commas, or line endings in the data), then it gets much easier. 

Doing this requires a an Acrobat automation script, your can read about this here:

https://www.pdfscripting.com/public/Automating-Acrobat.cfm

 

You can read about adding a field to a page here:

https://www.pdfscripting.com/public/PDF-Page-Coordinates.cfm?sd=40

Thom Parker - Software Developer at PDFScriptingUse the Acrobat JavaScript Reference early and often
try67
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 23, 2020

Well, these forums are about Adobe applications... You can do it in Acrobat, but not if the input file is an XLSX file. It has to be a plain-text file (CSV or TXT, for example).