How to export pdf form fields to xml automatically
How about Apache PDFBox? It is open source and could fit your needs, since the website says "Extract forms data from PDF forms or prefill a PDF form."
EDIT: Check out the PrintFields example.
In bash, you can do this (at least with my version of these tools, less 444 and cat 8.13):
less ~/Downloads/sample.pdf | catI get output that looks like this:
Static form headerFirst name: JohnLast name: DoeWhich you can then parse pretty obviously using Java/Python/awk/whatever.
Of course, alternatively, if you don't want to rely on the behavior of particular versions of these (not sure if they always do this or not), you can look up less's source code to see how it does it.
In Java there is a few libraries to work with PDF, but generally it's hard to get formatted information from PDF. I have never implemented that thing, but Qoppa looks good and seems to be advanced but it's not free. It contains jPDFFields which should be useful to extract values from form fields. Also there is a similar thread, in which there is some information about the command line tool.
I hope it will be helpful for you.