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 is the answer of Thomas, from the PDFBox-Mailinglist:

You will need to get the Fields over the COSDictionary. Try this code...

PDDocument pdDoc = PDDocument.load(new File("E:\\Form-Test.pdf"));
PDDocumentCatalog pdCatalog = pdDoc.getDocumentCatalog();
PDAcroForm acroForm = pdCatalog.getAcroForm();

COSDictionary acroFormDict = acroForm.getDictionary();
COSArray fields = acroFormDict.getDictionaryObject("Fields");
fields.clear();