How can I add a new AcroForm field to a PDF?

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I have used iText to fill data into existing AcroForm fields in a PDF.

I am now looking for a solution to add new AcroForm fields to a PDF. Is this possible with iText? If so, how can I do this?

Posted on StackOverflow on Nov 30, 2014 by Peter

This is documented in the official documentation, more specifically in the SubmitForm example. Additionally, I've written a simple example called AddField. It adds a button field at a specific position defined by new Rectangle(36, 700, 72, 730).

public void manipulatePdf(String src, String dest) throws DocumentException, IOException {
        PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(src);
        PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(reader, new FileOutputStream(dest));
        PushbuttonField button = new PushbuttonField(
            stamper.getWriter(), new Rectangle(36, 700, 72, 730), "post");
        button.setText("POST");
        button.setBackgroundColor(new GrayColor(0.7f));
        button.setVisibility(PushbuttonField.VISIBLE_BUT_DOES_NOT_PRINT);
        PdfFormField submit = button.getField();
        submit.setAction(PdfAction.createSubmitForm(
            "http://itextpdf.com:8180/book/request", null,
            PdfAction.SUBMIT_HTML_FORMAT | PdfAction.SUBMIT_COORDINATES));
        stamper.addAnnotation(submit, 1);
        stamper.close();
    }

As you can see, you need to create a PdfFormField object (using helper classes such as PushbuttonField, TextField,...) and then use PdfStamper's addAnnotation() method to add the field to a specific page.

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