CommonForms

Use it when

• You have a flat PDF that people currently print and hand-fill and want a model to insert candidate text or signature fields automatically.
• You are evaluating local form-field detection models through a CLI or Python API before manually reviewing the resulting AcroForm.

What it solves

Not the fit when

• Assuming unrestricted commercial or non-academic use; the repository states no explicit software license and asks non-academic users to contact the author.
• A documented directory-level batch converter; the README demonstrates one input PDF and one output PDF per invocation.
• OCR of scanned images, extracting text/tables, or filling detected fields with business data.
• Installing into a shared Python environment; the dependency set can upgrade numpy, Pillow, transformers, and other packages, so use uv tool, pipx, or an isolated virtual environment.
• Unreviewed production forms; model-detected fields and signature classifications require human validation.
• extracting text or tables from PDFs
• OCR of scanned images
• filling forms with data programmatically

Install

uv tool install commonforms  (or pipx install commonforms; as a library: pip install commonforms into a dedicated virtualenv)

Invoke

commonforms input.pdf output.pdf  (flags: --model FFDNet-L|FFDNet-S, --device cuda, --fast for CPU speed, --use-signature-fields, --multiline); or in Python: from commonforms import prepare_form; prepare_form("in.pdf", "out.pdf")

Alternatives

No reviewed alternatives recorded yet.