Merging PDFs with duplicate textbox names (Bug?)

[Patrick <pa...@trademonstergroup.com>]

I have run into an issue where I merged two PDF documents that both had a textbox with the same name.

Adobe products like Acrobat will only display the first textbox and not the second. Whereas the Chrome/Firefox PDF plugins and some applications like Foxit will display both textboxes just fine.

I've also found some Preflight job in Acrobat Pro resolved this issue. I don't know the PDF specification, but from what I've seen I'm assuming the PDF spec requires unique names for one type of input element. And if so, perhaps the PDFBox merger utility should throw an exception in the case there are duplicate names for one type of element.

Thanks

Re: Merging PDFs with duplicate textbox names (Bug?)

[Leonard Rosenthol <lr...@adobe.com>]

You can have multiple fields with the same name - however, they will
always have the same value.  So if you try to merge two forms with
different values of ³Name², you will get the same name across the document.

Leonard

On 10/1/14, 11:21 AM, "Patrick" <pa...@trademonstergroup.com>
wrote:

>I have run into an issue where I merged two PDF documents that both had a
>textbox with the same name.
>
>Adobe products like Acrobat will only display the first textbox and not
>the second. Whereas the Chrome/Firefox PDF plugins and some applications
>like Foxit will display both textboxes just fine.
>
>I've also found some Preflight job in Acrobat Pro resolved this issue. I
>don't know the PDF specification, but from what I've seen I'm assuming
>the PDF spec requires unique names for one type of input element. And if
>so, perhaps the PDFBox merger utility should throw an exception in the
>case there are duplicate names for one type of element.
>
>Thanks