iText in Action

Chapter 16. Filling and signing AcroForms

This chapter covers

• Reading and updating form fields

• Working with (X)FDF

• Signing a PDF document

• Verifying a signed PDF

In chapter 15, you created a PDF file with an AcroForm using iText. At the end of the chapter, you read that it isn’t important to use iText to do this. The main purpose of the previous chapter was to get familiar with the types of form fields.

In this chapter, you’ll use this newly acquired knowledge to retrieve data from an existing form and from an (X)FDF file. You’re also going to fill in form fields programmatically, and you’ll flatten the forms you’ve filled out. You already had an introduction to these techniques in chapter 2, but now we’ll take a closer look.

There’s also an important ...