Expand my Community achievements bar.

Dive into Adobe Summit 2024! Explore curated list of AEM sessions & labs, register, connect with experts, ask questions, engage, and share insights. Don't miss the excitement.

Convert dynamic pdf form to static pdf form

Avatar

Level 2

Is there a way to programatically convert dynamic pdf form to static pdf form?

My scenarios is our forms are dynamic pdf forms which have growing fields and dynamically added subforms. Once the user filled in the forms, the pdfs need to be converted to static pdf forms to be further processed by a 3rd party.

Thanks!

13 Replies

Avatar

Former Community Member

Do you mean a flattened PDF whereby the form is no longer interactive?

Steve

Avatar

Level 10

Hi,

you have several options.

1)     Print the form with a PDF printer — Produces a completely non-interactive PDF file with a very small file size

2)     Use JavaScript to lock down all or specific form fields — can also be combinated with password protection and preserves the interactivity of the form for further changes

     A sample can be found here http://forums.adobe.com/message/1921613#1921613

Avatar

Level 2

I can't flatten the pdf as it needs to be interactive when feeding into 3rd party's application. This 3rd party basically provides the functionilty for user to correct the form and eSign.

Avatar

Former Community Member

Both static forms and dynamic forms can be interactive. For the differences see http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/8.2/static_dynamic_diffs.pdf.

What form characteristics or behaviour are you trying to achieve by your definition of 'static'?

Steve

Avatar

Level 2

That's the limitation of the 3rd party application. They only take static pdf forms.

Whereas our forms are designed with dynamic xfa (fields will flow, subforms can have multiple copies depends on user's input, and some forms are dynamically generated with a subset of subforms based on user's choice, etc...). So, want to know if

there is any lifecycle services available to convert programatically.

If there is no way to do that and we have to convert all the templates to static pdf forms, will we loose all the functionaility we need?

Thanks!

Avatar

Level 1

I have similar issue, if you got a solution , please could you forward to me. My emailid is bala_21_us@yahoo.com

Avatar

Level 2

Did not find a solution to programatically convert dynamic PDF form to static PDF form.

An alternative way is to keep 2 sets of forms: XDP and dynamic PDF form.

User fills in dynamic PDF form. At the time you need to use static PDF,

you can extract the data from dynamic PDF and then re-render with XDP form to static PDF form by setting appropriate

PDFFormRenderSpec.

Avatar

Level 7

if any dynamic interactive form is rendered through "render pdf" activity by setting RenderOption/RenderAtClient="No", then it will produce static interactive form.

Avatar

Level 1

Hi there - you can use the "PDF Optimizer" under the Advanced menu option. Make sure that "Discard Objects" is checked off and within that menu item (in the PDF Optimizer dialogue box) you can check to "Flatten form fields." 

Avatar

Level 4

@Mrsunilg

Can't find this activity, can you provide please more details about it?

I have exacly the same situation.

Need to sign a pdf with a 3rd party application and it only allows static pdf forms, is there a way to convert an dynamic xfa Form to static pdf form programatically?

Avatar

Level 1

Hi,

it might be this:

Save as optimized pdf, choose in the discard objects the second item.

sorry I don't know how this is in english, I have it installed in dutch.

Works for me!

Avatar

Level 1

Hi I had the same issue but I found a simple solution. You just go to print - microprint to pdf - print - then save it as a different doc then you it is flattened. Hope it helps. It worked for me! Good luck!

Avatar

Level 1
Works also with Acrobat DC, other methods here fail because of the XML form