Customizing PDF Form Permissions

You can control the form filling permissions of a PDF in a variety of ways, which are outlined in this guide.

Client-Side Permissions

All form fields are associated with a corresponding widget annotation. These widget annotations are the visual form elements present on the PDF you interact with. If you want to restrict a user from filling in a form field, you can set the associated widget annotation to read-only. The different ways in which you can set a widget annotation to read-only are documented in our annotations’ permissions guide. Please keep in mind that since widget annotations are a subset of annotations, all the methods that convert an annotation to read-only mode are applicable to widget annotations too. Additionally, you’ll need the Form Creator license if you want to modify the properties of widget annotations.

Collaboration Permissions

If you’re using Collaboration Permissions, then the fill permissions have to be set up for the corresponding form fields. When you define permissions for form fields, the same permissions are applied to the corresponding widget annotations. You can read more about this in our guide on defining permissions using Collaboration Permissions.

Document-Level Permissions

The PDF specification defines a series of flags that can be set on a document to determine what a user can do with a document. These permissions are persisted even after you’ve exported a PDF. One of these permissions is whether or not the user can fill in the form fields.

PSPDFKit honors the permissions set on a document and enables or disables certain platform features based on the permission configuration. If you don’t want this behavior, you can disable it by setting PSPDFKit.Options.IGNORE_DOCUMENT_PERMISSIONS before the first call to PSPDFKit.load:

PSPDFKit.Options.IGNORE_DOCUMENT_PERMISSIONS = true;

PSPDFKit.load(defaultConfiguration);

You can read more about these permissions in our Document Permissions guide.