how to convert a pdf fill-in form to fixed content - solved

[Josef Lowder]

.
Solved (below)

On Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:41, Craig White wrote
> On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 19:05, Josef Lowder wrote:
> > .
> > Last year I used the IRS supplied pdf forms to prepare my tax returns. 
> > When I finished filling in the "fill-in" pdf forms, somehow, I converted 
> > each one to a new pdf form that had *fixed* data for printing out, 
> > emailing, etc.  But now I can't remember how I did that. 
> > 
> > How does one convert a pdf "fill-in" form to a fixed content pdf file?
> ----
> the question isn't entirely clear and the PDF form is always subject 
> to restrictions imposed by the creator but are you using AdobeReader >
> 7.08? or are you using evince or KPDF or what?
> 
> AdobeReader can certainly fill out forms and print them flattened and
> even save them if not restricted.
> 
> pdftk (command line driven utility) is capable of merging data fields
> from 'fdf' files into matching 'pdf' files but that doesn't sound 
> like what you are looking for.


Well, I stumbled into a solution by using xpdf.
(Couldn't get pdftk to work with the syntax described 
in man pdftk:  pdftk form-filled.pdf output fixedcontent.pdf flatten <E>

Instead, I opened the form-filled.pdf file with xpdf and printed 
it to filename fixedcontent.ps ... then used ps2pdf to convert it. 
This resulted in a file even smaller than the one I got last year.

The original file form-filled.pdf file was 291,092 bytes
The flattened result file last year was 67,570 bytes. 
The new flattened result using xpdf is 29,084 bytes 
and looks identical.