pdf-lib: Fill Form - Either missing template or form fields undefined

What were you trying to do?

Fill my template form

Why were you trying to do this?

So I can collect my salary twice a month 😃

How did you attempt to do it?

I saw PDFescape in a post and gave that a shot to be able to edit PDF form field names. Ran my prog and indeed form fields filled but the rest of the contents from my template file were missing.

I tried the Fill Form example file (dod_character.pdf) and it couldn’t find the form field names, so I also loaded that in PDFescape and saved from there, and then the same result of the rest of the template missing but form fields filled.

I thought maybe PDFescape could be the issue so I purchased the Adobe trial to be able to edit the form field names but there again, pdf-lib doesn’t find them (Error: PDFDocument has no form field with the name “prodCode”) even though definitely saved as such -

What actually happened?

Details 1 section up

What did you expect to happen?

For my template file to come through with fields filled

How can we reproduce the issue?

My code (nearly copied from yours) -

const { PDFDocument } = require('pdf-lib');
const fs = require('fs');

(async () => {

    const pdfUTF8 = fs.readFileSync('./test.pdf','utf8')
    var formPdfBytes = new TextEncoder("utf-8").encode(pdfUTF8);
  
    // Load a PDF with form fields
    const pdfDoc = await PDFDocument.load(formPdfBytes)

    // Get the form containing all the fields
    const form = pdfDoc.getForm()

    // Get all fields in the PDF by their names
    const productCodeField = form.getTextField('prodCode')
    const certNumberField = form.getTextField('certNumber')

    productCodeField.setText('Product code here')
    certNumberField.setText('Cert number here')

    // Serialize the PDFDocument to bytes (a Uint8Array)
    const pdfBytes = await pdfDoc.save()

    const data = fs.writeFileSync('./done.pdf', new Buffer.from(pdfBytes))

})().catch(e => {
  console.log(e)
});

Version

1.17.0

What environment are you running pdf-lib in?

Node

Required Reading

• I have read www.sscce.org.
• My report includes a Short, Self Contained, Correct (Compilable) Example.
• I have read Smart Questions.
• I have read 45 GitHub Issues Dos and Don’ts.

Additional Notes

No response