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neubert
neubert

Reputation: 16832

excluding invisible fields from pdftk

I'm using /usr/bin/pdftk filename.pdf dump_data_fields output - flatten to get the FDF fields in a PDF but it seems to be including invisible FDF fields as well.

https://docdro.id/nriB59b is a one-page PDF without any txt but with a number of these invisible FDF fields. pdftk's output can be seen at https://pastebin.com/ag6vweNP.

How can I exclude invisible FDF fields?

I'm currently using pdftk but I'm open to using other tools as well.

Thanks!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 340

Answers (1)

Amessihel
Amessihel

Reputation: 6424

My guess is you have to inspect the PDF yourself to detect if or not a field is invisible. In another side, it may become very tricky to tell if a field is invisible or not, except if a flag sets this.

For example, although I don't know if it's possible, but let say a field is outside the page or covered by another content... Is it visible or not?

By the way, you can use qpdf to inspect the content of a PDF file. The following command will decompress your pdf to get it human readable.

qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable orig.pdf uncompressed-qpdf.pdf

If you prefer a JSON representation:

qpdf --json your_pdf.pdf > your_pdf.json

If you go for the later one, you can parse the json output with jq.

Then, use the PDF speficication you want to apply. I suggest also these steps:

  • you produce a pdf with a given field visible
  • another copy of this pdf but with the field hidden
  • uncompress both of them and then compare them with diff.

Upvotes: 1

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