<story><title>Show HN: An API for filling out PDF forms</title><url>https://formapi.io</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nathan_f77</author><text>Hi HN! I started FormAPI because I&amp;#x27;ve been living in Southeast Asia for the last few years, and I&amp;#x27;ve had to fill in a lot of visa application and extension forms. I want to build a service where you can fill in visa forms online, so I built FormAPI as the first step towards that project.&lt;p&gt;I also used to work at Gusto (a payroll company), and we had to fill out a lot of tax forms, which took a lot of work. I know this is something that many financial and legal startups have to do, so  hopefully FormAPI can make this process a lot easier.&lt;p&gt;Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>konschubert</author><text>This is absolutely great and it will enable A LOT of very useful applications.&lt;p&gt;One question though: I assume that the automatic detection of form fields does not always work. Especially if the PDF does not exist in a “fillable&amp;quot; format. Am I right with that interpretation?</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: An API for filling out PDF forms</title><url>https://formapi.io</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nathan_f77</author><text>Hi HN! I started FormAPI because I&amp;#x27;ve been living in Southeast Asia for the last few years, and I&amp;#x27;ve had to fill in a lot of visa application and extension forms. I want to build a service where you can fill in visa forms online, so I built FormAPI as the first step towards that project.&lt;p&gt;I also used to work at Gusto (a payroll company), and we had to fill out a lot of tax forms, which took a lot of work. I know this is something that many financial and legal startups have to do, so  hopefully FormAPI can make this process a lot easier.&lt;p&gt;Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curun1r</author><text>Back in 2000-2001, I worked up a prototype of something similar using Adobe&amp;#x27;s FDF SDK [1] for PDF. We had a PDF-centric application that would render to PDF using an HTML -&amp;gt; PDF library and it was hugely problematic, so the prototype definitely made things a lot easier and, had the business not run out of money at about that time, it would have been the direction we headed with the product.&lt;p&gt;So, how similar is this to FDF? Does it use FDF under the hood? If not, what are the pros and cons of this over FDF?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.adobe.com&amp;#x2F;devnet&amp;#x2F;acrobat&amp;#x2F;fdftoolkit.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.adobe.com&amp;#x2F;devnet&amp;#x2F;acrobat&amp;#x2F;fdftoolkit.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>