Do you have an issue with a specific file(s)?
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Does the issue only happen on certain browsers?
Is your issue related to a front-end framework?
Is your issue related to annotations?
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Storing PDF Edits
Please describe your issue and provide steps to reproduce it:
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Was wondering if you guys have best practices for storing PDF edits in SQL and rendering them on a page on load. My current idea was to store, original and changed text, but this doesnt account for font, highlight changes etc. On the BE was thinking of using content replacer to edit the text stream of the file originally stored in S3. Wondering if you guys have a full stack best practice. We use React FE and Python Fast API BE
Please provide a link to a minimal sample where the issue is reproducible:
Hello, I’m AiRon, an automated tech support bot While you wait for one of our customer support representatives, I can help you with your question.
Storing PDF edits efficiently involves capturing all changes, including text, annotations, and formatting. Using Apryse’s WebViewer, you can handle this through XFDF files for annotations and content replacement for text changes. Storing the original and edited content alone might not suffice for comprehensive changes like formatting or annotations.
Some things you can try:
Use Apryse’s XFDF format to store annotations separately. This can capture highlights, notes, and other annotation data.
For text changes, consider using the ContentReplacer API to apply text updates directly to the PDF content stream.
Store the original PDF in S3 and maintain a separate database record for each edit operation, linking them through identifiers.
On the backend, process the stored changes using Python and apply them to the PDF when it is loaded.
On the frontend, use React to fetch and render the PDF along with its stored edits using the WebViewer API.
Here are some resources that might help you:
Annotations Guide: Learn how to use XFDF to handle annotations efficiently.
Are you changing the text of the PDF through content replacer and wanting to store the text? A description in your use case would help us provide a answer.
Yes I want to essentially store PDF edits whether that be actual text changes, or stylistic changes(font, font style etc, box resizing) Struggling to think of a extendable SQL schema to store all the possible edits a user can make. So was just wondering if there was an example or SOP for how to store these edits. Storing annotations was easy with XFDF data, but I don’t want to render those annotations over the text on doc load just have the pdf be edited
For Annotations I stored some metadata , the apryse annotation id, and the xfdf data. I want to know how/ or should I design a table to store edits and be able to either load them server side or apply them on client side
Keeping and storing every change made to the document would be somewhat complex right now.
You could try to capture:
positioning changes using the event “annotationChanged”
text content changes using the event “textContentUpdated”
Currently, we don’t see events allowing you to capture the style updates, but even if you could make it, you would have to harmonize all of these sources, which would be tricky.
Pulling the sources from a DB query, you would likely need to associate them with a certain set of actions (move, scale, edit, style, etc) and have some of our API’s wrapped in functions to re-execute changes. This could create a lot of issues in corner cases since most of these actions are async by nature.
A previous solution to keep changes even in case of refresh was to extract and store PDF pages that have been edited, keeping a reference of the page number, and essentially maintaining a Stack of changes per user.
