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 way to do this, is to remove the fields from the acrofrom.
For this you just need to get the document catalog, then the acroform and then remove all fields from this acroform.
The graphical representation is linked with the annotation and stay in the document.
So I wrote this code:
import java.io.File;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocumentCatalog;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDAcroForm;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.interactive.form.PDField;
public class PdfBoxTest {
public void test() throws Exception {
PDDocument pdDoc = PDDocument.load(new File("E:\Form-Test.pdf"));
PDDocumentCatalog pdCatalog = pdDoc.getDocumentCatalog();
PDAcroForm acroForm = pdCatalog.getAcroForm();
if (acroForm == null) {
System.out.println("No form-field --> stop");
return;
}
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
List<PDField> fields = acroForm.getFields();
// set the text in the form-field <-- does work
for (PDField field : fields) {
if (field.getFullyQualifiedName().equals("formfield1")) {
field.setValue("Test-String");
}
}
// remove form-field but keep text ???
// acroForm.getFields().clear(); <-- does not work
// acroForm.setFields(null); <-- does not work
// acroForm.setFields(new ArrayList()); <-- does not work
// ???
pdDoc.save("E:\Form-Test-Result.pdf");
pdDoc.close();
}
}
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