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

This works for sure - I've ran into this problem, debugged all-night, but finally figured out how to do this :)

This is assuming that you have capability to edit the PDF in some way/have some control over the PDF.

First, edit the forms using Acrobat Pro. Make them hidden and read-only.

Then you need to use two libraries: PDFBox and PDFClown.

PDFBox removes the thing that tells Adobe Reader that it's a form; PDFClown removes the actual field. PDFClown must be done first, then PDFBox (in that order. The other way around doesn't work).

Single field example code:

// PDF Clown code
File file = new File("Some file path"); 
Document document = file.getDocument();
Form form = file.getDocument.getForm();
Fields fields = form.getFields();
Field field = fields.get("some_field_name");

PageStamper stamper = new PageStamper(); 
FieldWidgets widgets = field.getWidgets();
Widget widget = widgets.get(0); // Generally is 0.. experiment to figure out
stamper.setPage(widget.getPage());

// Write text using text form field position as pivot.
PrimitiveComposer composer = stamper.getForeground();
Font font = font.get(document, "some_path"); 
composer.setFont(font, 10); 
double xCoordinate = widget.getBox().getX();
double yCoordinate = widget.getBox().getY(); 
composer.showText("text i want to display", new Point2D.Double(xCoordinate, yCoordinate)); 

// Actually delete the form field!
field.delete();
stamper.flush(); 

// Create new buffer to output to... 
Buffer buffer = new Buffer();
file.save(buffer, SerializationModeEnum.Standard); 
byte[] bytes = buffer.toByteArray(); 

// PDFBox code
InputStream pdfInput = new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes);
PDDocument pdfDocument = PDDocument.load(pdfInput);

// Tell Adobe we don't have forms anymore.
PDDocumentCatalog pdCatalog = pdfDocument.getDocumentCatalog();
PDAcroForm acroForm = pdCatalog.getAcroForm();
COSDictionary acroFormDict = acroForm.getDictionary();
COSArray cosFields = (COSArray) acroFormDict.getDictionaryObject("Fields");
cosFields.clear();

// Phew. Finally.
pdfDocument.save("Some file path");

Probably some typos here and there, but this should be enough to get the gist :)