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Open-Source PDF Software Capable of Extracting PDF Form Data

Extract submitted/filled form field values (incl. FDF/XFDF)

10 tools

Java

Apache PDFBox

CliLibrary

Java library and CLI toolset covering PDF creation from scratch (with embedded fonts and images), Unicode text extraction, splitting and merging, form field extraction and filling, PDF/A-1b validation via its Preflight module, rendering pages to PNG/JPEG, printing via the Java printing API, and digital signing. The de facto standard Java PDF library, used as the underlying engine behind numerous other tools in this directory (PDFsam, PDFLayoutTextStripper, PdfBox-Android, and more).

Tested
Perl

CAM::PDF

Library

Perl module (PDF 1.0–1.5) for reading and writing PDFs: extract/delete/duplicate pages, get page text/content trees, append/prepend pages from other PDFs, handle password-protected documents and permissions, list/add fonts, list/fill form fields, remove annotations, detect linearized PDFs, remove unused objects, and apply compression filters.

Tested
Stale
Python

invoice2data

Library

Extracts structured data from invoice PDFs: pulls text via pdftotext, pdfminer, or OCR (tesseract/tesseract4/Google Cloud Vision), then matches fields (invoice number, date, amount, line items) using regex patterns defined in per-supplier YAML templates; exports to CSV, JSON, XML, or renames files based on extracted content; supports batch folder processing.

Tested
Stale
JavaScript

pdf-lib

Library

Dependency-free JavaScript library (works in browsers, Node, Deno, React Native) to create PDFs from scratch or modify existing ones: add/insert/remove/copy pages, draw text (with embedded custom fonts), images (PNG/JPEG), vector graphics and SVG paths; create and fill AcroForm fields (text, checkbox, radio, dropdown) and read/flatten them; embed pages from other PDFs, split and merge documents, add file attachments, and read/set document metadata.

Stale
JavaScript

pdf2json

CliLibrary

Node.js library/CLI (built on Mozilla's pdf.js engine) that converts PDFs to JSON: extracts text (with position, rotation, styling, color, and font metadata), page layout, and interactive AcroForm field data (text inputs, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, signature fields); also outputs plain-text files, and runs as a REST service or stream-based parser.

Tested
Java

PDFLayoutTextStripper

Library

Subclass of Apache PDFBox's own `PDFTextStripper` specifically built to preserve a PDF's original layout and spatial positioning when converting it to plain text — where PDFBox's default stripper reflows text into reading order and loses column/table alignment, this one keeps whitespace positioned to match the source layout. Makes it noticeably easier to extract structured data such as tables and form content from the resulting plain text, at the cost of extra leading whitespace in the output.

Tested
Stale
Python

Pdfminer.six

Library

Pure-Python PDF-1.7 parser/extraction library: text, images, HTML, or hOCR output with exact text location/font/color data; AcroForm and tagged-content extraction; outline/TOC extraction; embedded image extraction (JPG, PNG, TIFF, JBIG2, bitmaps); CJK and vertical-writing support; Type1/TrueType/Type3/CID fonts; RC4/AES decryption; and decoding of ASCIIHex/ASCII85/LZW/Flate/RunLength/CCITTFax compression filters.

Tested
Rust

PDFOxide

BindingsCliLibraryServer

PDF toolkit built around a Rust engine, exposed as native bindings for ~20 languages (Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, C#/.NET, Java, and more), a CLI, and an MCP server for AI-assistant integration: text/character-level and image extraction, form-field reading and filling, Markdown/HTML conversion with heading detection, PDF creation and editing, watermarking, merging/splitting, regex-based search, and metadata access.

Tested
Python

pdfplumber

Library

Extracts text (with layout preservation, tolerance settings, regex search, and word bounding boxes), detects and extracts tables (via ruling-line or text-alignment strategies), and provides low-level access to characters, lines, rectangles, curves, images, annotations, hyperlinks, and form fields, with page cropping/filtering, password-protected PDF support, and visual debugging (page-to-image rendering with overlay annotations, incl. Jupyter display). Does not generate, modify, or OCR PDFs.

Tested
Java

PDFtk Server

Cli

Command-line tool to merge, split, and rotate PDFs; fill forms with FDF/XFDF data and flatten them (or generate an FDF stencil from a form's fields); encrypt and decrypt with passwords; add watermarks and stamps; manage bookmarks, metadata, and attachments; repair damaged PDFs; and recompress page streams. The Java-rewritten 'Server' edition of the classic PDFtk command-line tool, maintaining the same CLI interface and command syntax as the original.

Tested