PDFs processed with PyPDF lose editable content

[nick rundy]

For work I often use Evince to fill in PDFs that have editable fields. For example, some fields might contain boxes of Yes / No and I have to click/check-mark the box that corresponds to my answer.

I'm able to complete these forms successfully using Evince. But when I need to combine or rearrange the order of the PDFs I've filled-in using Evince and use PDF-Shuffler to accomplish this, the "check-marks" that I inputted in the PDFs always "vanish." That is, the check-marks that I created by clicking in the PDF yes/no boxes no longer appear after using PDF-Shuffler on the PDF.

As a consequence, I have been using MS-Windows and PDFCreator to accomplish this task. MS-Windows with PDFCreator does not have this bug.

Hopefully, this will be fixed because it would be nice to be able to use Ubuntu to accomplish this necessary work task.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: pdfshuffler 0.5.1-2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-13.22-generic 3.0.6
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-13-generic i686
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Dec 9 10:52:26 2011
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/pdfshuffler
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Beta i386 (20110901)
InterpreterPath: /usr/bin/python2.7
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: pdfshuffler
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-06 (63 days ago)

[Marcel Stimberg (marcelstimberg)]

Thank you for your bug report. I can confirm this issue, it is a problem with the underlying library that pdfshuffler uses for reading and writing PDF documents. I am therefore reassigning the package to PyPDF. I will also add a simple example that shows the problem.

[Marcel Stimberg (marcelstimberg)]

Ok, here the steps to recreate the problem:

1. Open the attached form.pdf with a pdf viewer (e.g. evince), fill some text in the text field and check the checkbox. Save the file as form_filled.pdf
2. Run the attached python script on the created file:
    python readwrite.py form_filled.pdf form_copied.pdf
3. Open the resulting file form_copied.pdf with a pdf viewer

In form_copied.pdf, the textfield still contains the entered text but is no longer editable, the checkbox disappeared completely.
The python script does nothing except for copying the first page of the given pdf document to a new file using the PyPDF library.