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How to remove Form?

Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 10:58 pm
by Zoranj
This is not interactive form element.
I am talking about form in PDF that usually have one or more objects combined.

There is an action "Put Selection in Form"
I want opposite of "Put Selection in Form", something like select content and remove form, or remove container of the form and leave content, or similar.

Example, I have some PDF with imposed items and die.
I am running actions to remove all elements except for die colour, however often die elements are in some kind of form inside the PDF so form stays as well.
I need completely clean PDF with only die lines, no forms, no containers, no nothing else.

I can manually edit form using form tool, but I want to do this in automated way, through Action.
There is also action "Select Form contents according to form selection" with option to deselect content, but it does not work.
It either removes both form and content or does nothing.

Thanks

Re: How to remove Form?

Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 4:53 pm
by Padawan
There are many kind of form objects in PDF. Can you share a sample file which illustrates the issue?

Re: How to remove Form?

Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 10:15 pm
by Zoranj
Sure, here is one example.
If you look in wireframe mode, you will see that dieline is part of a large form.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6jki7rg428wn4 ... m.pdf?dl=0

Re: How to remove Form?

Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2018 3:53 pm
by Padawan
I was thinking of an Action List with:
- Cut objects inside the form objects to the clipboard
- Remove all objects
- Paste the objects from the clipboard

But PitStop seems to want to keep the paths together with their form fields, so that doesn't work.

As far as I can tell there is no way to do what you want in Action Lists. I think you'll have to report it to Enfocus directly if you wish to have that double checked and maybe have that changed.

Out of curiosity, why do you want the form fields removed? Do you have some application which can't handle them?

Re: How to remove Form?

Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2018 4:17 pm
by Zoranj
Thanks for trying Padawan.
The reason being is these die files are than sent to vendor who does the actual Die for us.
This vendor has some ancient equipment and files need to be perfect, without anything in them.
I guess if software finds any lines even empty, it thinks it is cut.

I'll run it by Enfocus support to see.

Re: How to remove Form?

Posted: Fri Nov 05, 2021 1:14 pm
by estaub
Did you ever get a resolution to this?
I run into same issue.
Please post if you have.
Thanks

Re: How to remove Form?

Posted: Fri Nov 05, 2021 7:13 pm
by Zoranj
Unfortunately no resolution that I know of.
I am not sure if the latest version does anything with it, I am still using Pitstop 2020.

Re: How to remove Form?

Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2021 2:27 pm
by abailescollins
What you could try, and I would not normally say this but it might work in this case, is save the PDF as Postscript and re-distill it to PDF.
Forms don't exist in postscript, and if you then save as a low PDF version, you might be able to eliminate them.
I wouldn't suggest this normally, but as it's just a dieline it should be ok.

I tried it on a file I have with forms and the resulting PDF did not have forms afterwards.
I saved as PS lvl3, and distilled using the High Quality print setting in Distiller.

Re: How to remove Form?

Posted: Fri May 12, 2023 2:49 am
by ScottHaugaard
I know this post is old, but I've read that if you use Acrobat's Flattener Preview as a separate step, it will remove the forms. I think resaving the file as an X3 will do the same.

Unfortunately, I can't find a way to automate this.

Re: How to remove Form?

Posted: Fri May 12, 2023 5:21 pm
by freddyp
Flattening a PDF is part of the functionality of PitStop Server so it is easy to automate.