Flatten PDF

Flatten PDF turns a fillable PDF form into a fixed document: whatever is shown in each form field — typed text, ticked boxes, chosen options — is drawn onto the page as ordinary content, and the fields themselves are removed. It is for sending a completed application, invoice or contract so that the recipient sees exactly what you filled in and cannot change it by clicking into a field, and for making forms display the same in every viewer, including ones that render form fields badly.

Choose a PDF and the tool first counts its form fields. A file with none is reported plainly — "has no form fields, so there is nothing to flatten" — and the button stays disabled, because there would be nothing to change. Otherwise, click "Flatten PDF". For every field, the appearance a viewer is currently showing is placed on its page at exactly the field's position, following the PDF rule for fitting a field's drawing into its rectangle. Fields marked hidden are removed without being drawn, as viewers do not show them either; so are fields set to appear on screen but not print, because page content always prints — the flattened file prints exactly as before, and the result tells you when this happened. An unticked check box with no drawing for its "off" state stays empty, as viewers show it. When a form asks viewers to redraw its text fields (a flag often set by browser form-filling) or a text field or list has no saved appearance, that appearance is regenerated in Helvetica first, and the result lists those fields so you can check them; values with characters Helvetica cannot show keep their saved appearance.

Then the whole interactive form is removed from the file, so no viewer offers anything to fill in. The rest of the document is left exactly as it was, because the file is edited in place: page text, images, bookmarks and links stay. Comments, highlights and stamps are annotations, not form fields, and this tool leaves them alone — the result tells you how many remain. Nothing is rasterised: the flattened values remain vector text, and our automated tests check that a flattened name and dropdown choice can still be extracted as text.

Flattening is about editing, not security. The values are no longer form fields, but the PDF is not encrypted or locked, so someone with a PDF editor can still change page content. A digital signature field is flattened like any other, and an existing signature stops validating because the file changed. Dynamic XFA forms (from Adobe LiveCycle) have no standard fields and cannot be flattened here. Password-protected PDFs are refused, and files up to 200 MB are accepted.

Your PDF is not uploaded. It is read and flattened inside your browser tab with pdf-lib; you can confirm in the Network tab of your browser's developer tools that no request carries the file. The site loads its own scripts and analytics, never your documents.

1. The file's signature is checked, pdf-lib opens it (encrypted and damaged files are refused), and the form fields are counted; an XFA layer, if present, is noted and removed. 2. Text fields and lists whose appearance is missing, or stale because the form sets NeedAppearances, are redrawn with Helvetica where possible. Check boxes and radio buttons are never redrawn: a state with no drawing stays empty. 3. Widgets that are hidden, or set not to print, are removed without being drawn. For every other widget of every field, its current normal appearance (for check boxes and radio buttons, the state named by /AS) is drawn into its page's content as a form XObject, positioned by mapping the appearance's BBox (transformed by its Matrix) onto the widget rectangle — ISO 32000-1 §12.5.5. 4. The widgets are removed from each page's annotation list, the AcroForm is deleted from the document, and the field objects are discarded; other annotations are kept and counted. 5. The file is saved as <name>-flattened.pdf.