flatten

Flatten PDF

Bake form answers and annotations into the page so they cannot be changed.

Reads: a PDF — application/pdf
Writes: one file — PDFs
Tool page: /flatten-pdf

Example

Bake the answers in, so what the next reader opens cannot be edited.

Given

answered.pdf — a PDF carrying form fields

From code

            import { loadDocument, runOperation } from '@pagecraft/core';

const answered = await loadDocument({ bytes, name: 'answered.pdf' });

const [output] = await runOperation('flatten', [answered], {
  fields: true,
  annotations: true,
});

From a shell

            pagecraft flatten answered.pdf

What comes back

One PDF of 1 page.

This example is run by the test suite. If it stopped being true, the build would fail.

Options

`fields--fields`

boolean

Form fields

Bake the answers into the page, so the recipient cannot alter them.

Default: true

`annotations--annotations`

boolean

Annotations

Bake stamps, notes and drawings into the page as well.

Default: true

`fontFile--font-file`

Uint8Array

Font file

A TrueType or OpenType font, for text in a script the built-in fonts cannot draw.

What it cannot do

Flattening cannot be undone. The answers become part of the page, and nothing can read them back out as a form — which is the point of it.
A box the document never drew is drawn first, so that a form filled in by another tool is baked with its answers rather than blank. A box whose current state the document deliberately left blank — an unticked box — stays blank.
An annotation carrying no appearance has nothing to bake, so it is left as it is and reported.
Links are left working. Baking one would delete the jump and draw nothing in its place.
A hidden annotation is taken away rather than drawn, because a reader does not draw it either and a page that gained it would not be the same page.
A signature is not re-drawn. Its appearance is the signer’s, and flattening a signed document breaks the signature that covered it.