Reading password-protected pdf files

[stevechoy]

Hi,

Just wondering if it is possible to have a function argument to provide passwords for most of the core functions?

The use-case is that pdftools does not support bookmarks, so whenever I use pdftools::pdf_combine() to remove passwords from a pdf, any existing bookmarks are lost, which is unfortunate.

staplr is one of the easiest R-packages that I can see that has good support for bookmarks, so it would be great if it can support passwords as well.

[oganm]

In this branch I added password support for form filling and stapling functions. will add it to the rest but do let me know if you run into issues with this

[stevechoy]

Hi @oganm ,

Thanks for the reply - I'm not an advanced developer so I'm not sure what's the best way for me to start using this new branch.

FYI, I've recently created a simple GUI Shiny app and I've used staplr::staple_pdf to combine PDF files as it is the only way to retain bookmarks as pdftools (i.e. qpdf) are not able to do so, which is a pretty big deal for large reports.

As most of my target users are not advanced folks, my instructions to them was to recommend installing the CRAN version of staplr. Until your changes are live on CRAN, do you have any advice on making this work?

[oganm]

You can install from the branch by doing devtools::install_github("pridiltal/staplr@passwords").

[oganm]

As a side note, if your users are already opening an R session themselves to manually install dependencies, the most efficient way would probably be to package the whole app as an R package and say, host it on github. that way when they do devtools::install_github("stevechoy/PDF_Combiner") they will be installing everything that is needed.

Note that install_github also supports Remotes section in description which would allow you to specify installing the specific version of this package from github as well.