PDF Filling Utility
This small program was written to automatize filling and sending PDFs to a hundred persons. Before, this was done manually on paper, now it can be filled automatically based on user data from a database, and emailed automatically.
Created with Node.js®
During the time that I was chief scout, one of my responsibilities was to provide parents with forms so that they can get money back from the taxes or from the healthcare system.
Sometimes we’d get these documents in an editable readable form, which allows us to use mail merge in the MS Office suite. Other documents were sent by post. This program was written to fill one of those analogue documents digitally.
Workflow:
- Scan document
- Update xy coordinates of fields to fill on the PDF
- Extract required data from user dashboards on scout backend
- Run the program as test, verify output
- Run the mailer to automatically email the document to the parents.
I’ve used this tool for 2 years and it saved me several hours of work + a huge amount of paperwork.
Tech
I chose to use Node.js for this project because it’s easy to setup and a lot is available through NPM.
Modules used in this project include:
- csv-parse
- gmail-send
- hummus-recipe (to write on PDF)
- moment (to easily manipulate date-time formats)
