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

If the PDF document doesn't actually contain form fields but you still want to flatten other elements like markups, the following works quite well. FYI It was implemented for C#

    public static void FlattenPdf(string fileName)
            {
                PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(new java.io.File(fileName));
    
                java.util.List annots = doc.getPage(0).getAnnotations();
                for (int i = 0; i < annots.size(); ++i)
                {
                    PDAnnotation annot = (PDAnnotation)annots.get(i);
                    annot.setLocked(true);
                    annot.setReadOnly(true);
                    annot.setNoRotate(true);
                }
    
                doc.save(fileName);
                doc.close();
    }

This effectively locks all markups in the document and they will no longer be editable.

pdfbox c# annotations