From Newsgroup: comp.text.pdf

On 26/06/2025 01:51, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 25 Jun 2025 16:37:26 +0100, Peter Flynn wrote:

Because the "fields" (blank spaces) are the same location every
time, using LaTeX makes it possible to do the whole things from a
script.

I used to do something similar for filling out my GST return, only using a Python script and the Cairo graphics library -- import each page of the
PDF file, draw the filled-in entries on top of it, and print the result
out.

I did routines for things like splitting out the digits of a number so
each would fit, nicely centred, in its own box -- does LaTEX make this
sort of thing easy?

I wrote a couple of macros to do this. Not hard, but fiddly, and most
forms are internally inconsistent in that the digit boxes are not always
the same size or shape. OCR forms are better. Fortunately becoming less
and less common these days.

Peter
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From Newsgroup: comp.text.pdf

On Wed, 9 Jul 2025 00:16:56 +0100, Peter Flynn wrote:

On 26/06/2025 01:51, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

I did routines for things like splitting out the digits of a number so
each would fit, nicely centred, in its own box -- does LaTEX make this
sort of thing easy?

I wrote a couple of macros to do this. Not hard, but fiddly, and most
forms are internally inconsistent in that the digit boxes are not always
the same size or shape.

This wasnrCOt hard in Python. Even if the digit boxes werenrCOt regularly arranged (they were), it would just have meant manually specifying the coordinates of each box.
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