PDF fields become non editable in Adobe reader after writing to it using Pdfbox APIs

[Balaji Venkatamohan <bv...@tibco.com>]

Hello,

I am reading a PDF which has editable fields and which can be edited by
opening it through Adobe Reader. I am using PDFBox to generate an output
PDF with data filled for the fields in input PDF. The output PDF can be
opened using Adobe Reader and I am able to see the field values but I am
unable to edit those fields directly from Adobe reader.

There is also a JIRA ticket :
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-1121
Can anybody please tell me if this got resolved? Also, if possible please
answer the following questions.

1. Is there any protection policy or access permission that I need to
explicitly set in order to edit the output PDF from Adobe reader?
2. When i try to write/overwrite data present in the output PDF acro form
fields using PdfBox. The API is able to get the list of all fields from the
acrofields and programmatically I am able to see those values are being set
to the respective fields. When I open the output PDF though, the values are
not there. I see the old values. Could you please let me know if this a
known issue/behavior with PdfBox?
3. Every time I open the PDF that was written to using pdfbox APIs, I get
this message prompt:

" The document has been changed since it was created and use of extended
features is no longer avalable...."

I am using PdfBox 1.8.6 jar and Adobe reader 11.0.8. I would really
appreciate if anybody could help me with this issue.

Thanks,
Balaji

Re: PDF fields become non editable in Adobe reader after writing to it using Pdfbox APIs

[Maruan Sahyoun <sa...@fileaffairs.de>]

the form you are trying to fill is using what’s called Adobe Reader Extensions which enables a user to fill form data using the free Adobe Reader and save the filled out form. Now when you start filling out the data and do a document.save() you end up with a full save of the document i.e. it’s content is regenerated. This makes the Reader Extensions Certificate invalid.

What you need to do is an incremental save of the form data by appending the changes to the original document. On higher level PDModel API PDFBox supports this only for digital signatures. So you are somewhat on your own to implement this for form data too using the lower level COS Model.

I’m happy to give you some further guidance if you are looking into implementing this. But it will be a several days effort so not something which can be done in hours. 

With kind regards

Maruan

Am 21.08.2014 um 01:53 schrieb Balaji Venkatamohan <bv...@tibco.com>:

> Hello,
> 
> I am reading a PDF which has editable fields and which can be edited by
> opening it through Adobe Reader. I am using PDFBox to generate an output
> PDF with data filled for the fields in input PDF. The output PDF can be
> opened using Adobe Reader and I am able to see the field values but I am
> unable to edit those fields directly from Adobe reader.
> 
> There is also a JIRA ticket :
> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-1121
> Can anybody please tell me if this got resolved? Also, if possible please
> answer the following questions.
> 
> 1. Is there any protection policy or access permission that I need to
> explicitly set in order to edit the output PDF from Adobe reader?
> 2. When i try to write/overwrite data present in the output PDF acro form
> fields using PdfBox. The API is able to get the list of all fields from the
> acrofields and programmatically I am able to see those values are being set
> to the respective fields. When I open the output PDF though, the values are
> not there. I see the old values. Could you please let me know if this a
> known issue/behavior with PdfBox?
> 3. Every time I open the PDF that was written to using pdfbox APIs, I get
> this message prompt:
> 
> " The document has been changed since it was created and use of extended
> features is no longer avalable...."
> 
> I am using PdfBox 1.8.6 jar and Adobe reader 11.0.8. I would really
> appreciate if anybody could help me with this issue.
> 
> Thanks,
> Balaji