Bug#792168: pdftk breaks PDF forms

[Gregory Heytings]

Package: pdftk
Version: 2.01-1
Severity: important

Hi,

pdftk (both 1.41 and 2.01) breaks PDF forms.



Note that the forms are only visible in Acrobat Reader.

Many thanks,

Gregory

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages pdftk depends on:
ii  libc6       2.17-97
ii  libgcc1     1:4.8.2-16
ii  libgcj14    4.8.2-16
ii  libstdc++6  4.8.2-16

pdftk recommends no packages.

Versions of packages pdftk suggests:
ii  poppler-utils [xpdf-utils]  0.22.5-4

-- no debconf information

More precisely, the "/NeedAppearances true" entry in the AcroForm dictionary is silently removed by pdftk, even in a simple "pdftk in.pdf cat output out.pdf" operation. Attached to this report are three PDF files: "good.pdf" with a simple form, "pdftk-wrong.pdf" obtained with "pdftk cat output", and "pdftk-correct.pdf" which is the (corrected by hand) file I would have expected to get.

good.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

pdftk-correct.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

pdftk-wrong.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document