Flatten PDF
Flatten a PDF free, entirely in your browser — merge form fields, annotations, and layers into the page content so they can no longer be edited or filled in.
- Add
- Adjust
- Make
- Keep
How to use this tool
- Upload the PDF whose form fields, annotations, and optional layers you want to lock into the page itself.
- Choose what to bake: interactive form fields so the filled values can no longer be edited, appearance-bearing annotations like stamps, highlights, and free text, and optional content layers so their visibility can no longer be toggled.
- Pick whether to flatten the whole document or only selected pages, and optionally tick the cleanup boxes to strip metadata, document-level scripts, and embedded attachments in the same pass.
- Review the warnings (for example unsupported annotation types that were left as they are), then download the result — the selected content is now part of the page and nothing else was changed.
About this tool
Flatten a PDF free, entirely in your browser — merge form fields, annotations, and layers into the page content so they can no longer be edited or filled in. Nothing is uploaded; the flattened PDF is rebuilt locally and downloads straight from your device.
Privacy & limitations
Flattening is irreversible: once form fields or annotations are baked into the page there is no built-in way to make them editable again, so keep the original file if you might need the interactive version later. Layer flattening is approximated: pdf-lib cannot reconstruct optional-content groups, so this app removes the layer configuration entirely — content that is currently hidden will not reappear and no layer can be hidden again, but documents with complex layer state may not be flattened pixel-perfectly. Field flattening works at the whole-form level because a form field's value is shared across every page — choosing a subset of pages still bakes the entire form (a warning is shown when this happens), and password-protected PDFs must be unlocked first using Remove Password.
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