Restful API Newbie Question About Creating/Combining/Converting/Flattening PDFs

[miraklemax]

Hi, all,

Question for experts from a newb. This is what I'd like to do, but not sure if I can do it with Adobe APIs.

I have a client that generates a lot of documents and images. Formats are Word, Excel, Text, PNG. They also generate PDFs. Some of the PDFs contain annotations, comments and filled-in fields.

What we need is a RESTful API that can do this:

We send the API a pile of documents of various formats using HTTP POST. We tell the API what order the docs should be in. This "pile" can contain all the docs above including annotated PDFs.

The API converts everything it was sent into ONE single, combined PDF in the specified order. All annotations of any kind are "flattened".

Is this possible? If so, can someone point me to the API docs that would cover this? I use Postman and know how to work with APIs, but don't readily see anything in the docs here about submitting via REST, setting the doc order, flattening, etc. Thanks!

[miraklemax]

or if the above won't work, suggestions on other restful APIs out there that could do all this. Or in-house servers/services/processes that could be called with the command line. open to possibilities.

[Joel_Geraci]

Our REST endpoints just got published. You can check them out here

[miraklemax]

thanks!! do you know if they have any of the flattening functionality i mentioned above? when i look, i don't see anything obvious...

[Joel_Geraci]

No. However, you can apply security to a PDF to prevent modification which is sufficient for some use cases though not all. Are you referring to form field flattening, transparency flattening, annotation flattening? It is unfortunately a very loose term.

[miraklemax]

all of the above flattening. we're creating PDFs that are combined from other PDFs that may have all of the above kinds of flattening needs (form field, annotation etc). the final PDF needs to be ALL the way flattened to successfully submit the PDFs/upload them to local government tax authorities. If they aren't flattened, they get rejected.

So this seems like I can't do it with this API then, alas?

thx

[Joel_Geraci]

Not this API but you can check out Callas Software. Callas is an Adobe Partner.