PDFBox: How to “flatten” a PDF-form?

Question

How do I \"flatten\" a PDF-form (remove the form-field but keep the text of the field) with PDFBox?

Same question was answered here:

a quick

Answer 1

With PDFBox 2 it's now possible to "flatten" a PDF-form easily by calling the flatten method on a PDAcroForm object. See Javadoc: PDAcroForm.flatten().

Simplified code with an example call of this method:

//Load the document
PDDocument pDDocument = PDDocument.load(new File("E:\\Form-Test.pdf"));    
PDAcroForm pDAcroForm = pDDocument.getDocumentCatalog().getAcroForm();

//Fill the document
...

//Flatten the document
pDAcroForm.flatten();

//Save the document
pDDocument.save("E:\\Form-Test-Result.pdf");
pDDocument.close();

Note: dynamic XFA forms cannot be flatten.

For migration from PDFBox 1.* to 2.0, take a look at the official migration guide.